Quip Busts Barriers Between Documents and Spreadsheets

Bret Taylor, co-founder and chief executive officer of Quip and the former chief technology officer of Facebook. David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images

When I email Bret Taylor about the new spreadsheet tool built into Quip—the online collaboration service he helped create after stepping down as Facebook’s chief technology officer—he’s happy to talk about it. But that’s not all he wants to do. He wants to show me how it works, face-to-face. Such a request isn’t uncommon when someone builds a new piece of software, but it’s particularly appropriate with Quip.

When Quip debuted last year, it was pegged as a “mobile-first word processor,” a 21st-century rethink of Microsoft Word that runs on phones and tablets as well as desktops and laptops. But that never quite did it justice. Yes, it plays nicely with mobile devices, and yes, it lets you edit documents. But ultimately, the point is that it turns document editing into a collaborative process, where multiple people can not only shape the same document over the internet and keep track of their many changes, but also discuss what they’re doing by way of a built-in chat tool.

Quip isn’t a word processor. It’s something different. At Taser International, top executives use it to build an agenda for their weekly meeting—among other things—and according to CEO Rick Smith, they end up finishing half the meeting over Quip, thanks to that chat tool. “People just comment back and forth, before the meetings,” he says. “So the meetings are cut in half—or more.”

By the same token, Quip’s new spreadsheet tool—released on Thursday—isn’t what it might seem. It’s not an online version of Microsoft Excel. It doesn’t work like, say, Google’s online spreadsheet service. It lets you integrate spreadsheets—or snippets of spreadsheets or simply data pulled from spreadsheets—into any other document you’re working on. “This isn’t a separate type of app. This isn’t a separate type of document. You can embed spreadsheets in other documents, with everything else,” Taylor says, as he demonstrates the tool at his startup’s offices in San Francisco, alongside company co-founder Kevin Gibbs. “Just as you can insert an image or a link, you can insert a spreadsheet.”

Yes, there are other ways of doing this kind of thing. But Quip does it in a uniquely fluid way. The idea is to break down the barriers between apps that often hamper the way we work. “As we were designing this, our vision wasn’t Microsoft Office for tablets,” Taylor explains. “We’re trying to reimagine the productivity suite around communication and collaboration as its primary function. The document—in this case, the spreadsheet—serves that primary goal.”

Quip is at the forefront of a sweeping effort to overturn the familiar paradigms that have driven the use of office software over the last thirty years. Thanks to Microsoft Word and Excel, so many of us think in terms of discrete digital files that get sent from machine to machine via email, but a new wave of companies—including Evernote, Box, and Dropbox as well as Quip and Google—are creating a new kind of collaboration. Digital files—based on a metaphor from the physical world—are giving way to internet services that let you collect and trade information in far more fluid ways. Even Microsoft is moving in this direction.

Some ask which of these many companies will ultimately win the day—dominate the business world as Microsoft once did. But this isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game. “Particularly because of software as service, the notion that there will be one winner might not make any sense at all,” says Steven Sinofsky, who once oversaw Microsoft’s Office suite and is now an advisor to Box and an admirer of Quip. “There’s just a lot of innovation going on here—a lot of people doing a lot of different things—and it’s exciting to watch. They’re rethinking this whole space.”

What’s undeniable is that we’re moving away from traditional office software. According to Taylor, Quip is now used by 10,000 businesses. Evernote claims 16,000. And though these tools are used alongside all sorts of other software tools, they’re very much changing the way businesses do things. According to Taser CEO Smith, for instance, Quip has significantly cut into the company’s use of older tools. “I’m spending a lot less time in Office and a lot more time in Quip,” he says. “It has probably cut by Word use by 90 percent.”

Yes, Quip can now cut into the use of Excel as well. But more than that, Taylor wants to bring the power of spreadsheets to a new kind of user, to make it easier for even the average worker to juggle numbers. “By making this another type of content you can put into this canvas,” he says, referring to Quip documents, “it makes spreadsheets more accessible.”

Both Smith and Marc Bodnick, who uses Quip inside the online startup Quora, say that although they don’t yet have access to the Quid spreadsheet tool, it’s the next logical step in the evolution of the service—and a needed thing. Smith says that inside Taser, many still email Word documents around when they need to include tables and other data, and he believes Quip can ultimately streamline this relatively cumbersome process.

That said, Quip’s tool still relies on some of the old paradigms that make spreadsheets difficult to use. In order to add spreadsheet data to documents, for instance, you have to lean on spreadsheet formulas—codes that crunch data lifted from various spreadsheet cells—and as Taylor acknowledges, this isn’t always ideal. But even as it stands, the tool is a step towards something new. As Sinofsky says, it’s part of an “ongoing redefinition of the productivity document.”