There’s a fun announcement today: my.instacalc.com is live and available for testing! Call it YouTube meets Excel meets Wikipedia if you like — it’s really just about sharing solutions to problems.

You can browse public calculations, save your own, or leave a comment — and any changes you’ve made are saved. Here are the features:

Fast Browsing

Imagine I gave you a directory full of spreadsheets. How would you “browse” them? Open each in Excel separately? Yeck. Try this:

Calcs appear in a list — you get an instant preview when you move your mouse over the name. No “put your left click in and your back button back” hokey-pokey dance when trying to find what you need. Move the mouse, find what you like, and click to get the full version. Fast, easy and simple.

Simple Sharing

I’m a user too. I hate logins and forgotten passwords — I just want answers fast and without a hassle, and I imagine you are similar.

Create a new calc (or import an existing link), pick a title and description, and save it. Boom. Zero to shared calc in 10 seconds flat:

Once you have your calc, anyone can leave a comment. Your original calc stays the same, but you can click the date of any comment to see the numbers used at that time. Instantly.

Powerful Searching

We’re used to searching for the title or description of what we want. That’s great, but the meat of the content is inside the calculator. Guess what? You can search text inside the calc. If you want to find calculations that have the word “rent” somewhere inside them, just search for rent.

You can even find the calcs that use square root.

Ready, Set, Share

This is the first round of sharing. The interface, the features, the layout — they will all change in the future. The goal was to stop the cycle of endless tweaking and get something out there for everyone to try.

Once the sharing site has done a test-run, I’ll make it a part of the main site. Feel free to share your calcs! I’m interested to see how people are using the site and any feedback you have.