New app allows you to access Facebook from within excel style spreadsheets at work

Brilliant App Lets You Access Facebook From Within Excel Spreadsheets At Work

June 18th, 2011 by Niall Harbison in Facebook

People using Facebook in work is a huge problem for employers and some go as far as banning it completely for all their employees in a fruitless bid to increase productivity. Well a new app from Diesel is seeking to solve that problem and allow you to access Facebook all day long without anybody being the wiser that you are social networking your little life away instead of working on tiresome documents. The app hooks up to your Facebook account using Facebook connect and you can start updating your status, liking content and chatting with your friends all from what looks like an excel spreadsheet to the outside world. Their campaign is all about making work more fun and although employers are not going to like this you have to take your hat off to Diesel for coming up with a great concept that is sure to get some serious buzz online in the coming days. Excel spreadsheets have never been this fun. Introducing Excelbook…

Connect Your Account

This is essentially a desktop app so the first thing you will have to do is head over to the site and download it for either PC or Mac. Once it launches the app will prompt you to log in with your Facebook account and ask you to pull information from your account.

Update Status And Interact With Friends

Once you have logged in to the app it looks to all intents and purposes that you are using an excel spreadsheet and carrying out serious work. All your Facebook status updates and messages from your friends display within the columns and you can even flick between the wall, chat and the news feed. It’s not the full Facebook experience but you can always click on the links which will open up in a new window and you can do simple things like update your status and reply to friends from within the spreadsheet.

Genius Marketing

All of this is carried out by Diesel in a bid to make work more fun and you can see the campaign site here. It’s a cool little app that will get people talking and some people might use it but it’s more about making a bit of noise around the launch of the campaign and for the relatively small cost of developing a simple app it is something that will get massive coverage because of it’s connections to Facebook. Hats off to Diesel on this one.