SpreadTweet is a way to view your Twitter account, looking like an Excel worksheet.
It seems that not a day or maybe even an hour goes by without some new Twitter program or service is released, but we had to love this one – SpreadTweet.
SpreadTweet is a way to view your Twitter account, looking like an Excel worksheet. The idea is that bosses walking past will see you beavering away on Excel without looking at the details of the worksheet.
A clever idea and reminiscent of the ‘boss key’ in many games which flashed up a sincere looking worksheet or document.
Install
Download Spreadtweet from here – there are versions to emulate Office for Mac (X), Excel 2003 or Excel 2007.
Spreadtweet runs over Adobe’s AIR runtime system, we didn’t have that installed but it was downloaded and setup automatically when we installed Spreadtweet so the whole thing only took a minute or two.
You are then prompted for your Twitter login using a standard Windows login dialog.
Look
Spreadtweet looks very much like Excel – really way too much like Excel and it’s probably only a matter of time before legal demands start arriving at the door of the developer.
Of course most of the regular Excel tabs, icons and buttons don’t work at all.
Even the standard Windows commands on top right (minimize, maximise and close) are fakes. Spreadtweets window seems to be a fixed size and the only way to shut it down is to right-click on the taskbar.
Only the vertical scroll bar lets you move up and down your Twitter message list.
SpreadTweet does look so much like real Excel that it can be a bit confusing if you also have Excel open – switching to the wrong ‘spreadsheet’. If that’s a problem you could change the Excel 2007 color scheme (Excel Options | Popular | Color Scheme) away from the blue imitation used by SpreadTweet.
Use
Aside from the trick on your boss, Spreadtweet is really an efficient way to view and send tweets. It is more compact than the traditional Twitter web page.
There are buttons to view replies and direct messages as well as send new tweets.
Web links are clickable to open in your default browser.
Click on @
Click on #
Clicking on a Twitter user name in the ‘B’ column starts an @ message to that person.
Of course, if you use SpreadTweet or any other Twitter utility we invite you to:
Follow Office Watch on Twitter – details or direct link.
See Also
- Bring Twitter searches into Excel
- Using Excel (the real one) to read Twitter
- Office chatter on Twitter
- Office Watch comes to Twitter
