Quip

online web application as a combination of Microsoft Word and Excel with to-do management. expensive.

Quip is allows teams to collaborate on text and spreadsheet documents and organize them into either private or shared folders. Some initial impressions:

SIGN UP & RELATED

• You can sign up for a free trial, but how long is that for?
• Tedious sign-up procedure that offers you a free t-shirt in exchange for co-workers' email addresses and the promise that I'll share a doc with one of them and they edit it within 7 days. A pointless and distracting gimmick doesn't make a good impression for a productivity app.
• Privacy: website says your data is protected by encryption. Meaningless statement without details. Data in transit (TLS?), at rest on their server or end-to-end encryption? Or do they mean I can encrypt a document or folder. Who knows.
• Expensive compared to Nuclino.

FUNCTIONALITY

THE GOOD:

• You can create & organize text and spreadsheet documents, but not presentation-type documents
• Useful collaborative functionality, including sharing into diff. folders, tracking changes, flexible comment system.
• Text documents: tags, mentions, links, html support, image import, rich text format, checkboxes/to-do lists, document duplication, basic formatting (e.g. can decide if an image is centred, floats, etc.)
• Text document functionality is Quip's greatest strength.
• Text and spreadsheets are easily exported to pdf. Nice!

THE NOT SO GOOD:

• Editing a document? You can't upload a document to embed. Oh, except if you comment on it. Then you can upload a document to the comment and then it's included. Why like this? Dunno. Not obvious or handy.
• You can upload documents (e.g. pdf) to a folder. Then it's not part of the document you're working on. Which I thought was the point of Quip.com. So I tried it anyway on 97kB .pdf file. It got stuck and never uploaded. Then I checked the folder. Oh, it's there after all. I click to open/preview it. Never displays correctly.
• Spreadsheets are pretty basic.
• It seems you can't import data from a spreadsheet you already have, e.g. locally in Excel. That's a huge fail. I have a company, we have data. Quip is supposed to allow me to collaborate on my data with colleagues. I can't import my data. What?!
• Slow, slow search within documents: I set up two text based documents (one a copy of each other). That's all I had. Took 10 seconds or so to find a word both had.

Anything beyond the above either doesn't immediately stand out or isn't there. Additional functionality is largely brought in via integration with other services (e.g. Dropbox - which I don't use because of the horrific security/privacy implications), Evernote (same), Twitter (same), Slack (same...) and so on. So none of these really appeal to me.

ALTERNATIVE APPS

It's been compared to Evernote. Ignore that. This isn't a personal data organizer. Quip offers integration with Evernote, which it wouldn't if they were replacements for each other.

The most obvious alternative Quip I'm aware of is Nuclino, which is a team-based Wiki thing. Quip is also that kind of thing, but rather than collaboration on a web-page type thing it has flexible, Word-type documents. It's halfway there to being an electronic lab-book, almost.