A buddy of mine in Calgary, AB, just called and asked if I knew of some kind of solution for a web-accessible contact database. His church needs a simple, cheap way of creating shareable, maintainable records of those who contact them asking for resources or information.

I took a quick look at Google Base. It’s perfect for the job, with one caveat. Since it’s not private, it won’t do. (Not too many people would be happy with a church spreading their private contact information all over the world wide web!)

So I went looking for other solutions - an online “web 2.0″ spreadsheet app built with Ajax would do the trick.

I ran across Num Sum. Bingo! Here’s a quick look at the editor - just like any other spreadsheet, but in your browser:

It needs Firefox to run, of course (if you’re on a Mac - on PCs it will also run on IE), but that’s no problem. Everyone has it, or can easily get it.

Frankly, creating a spreadsheet on Num Sum is easier than creating one in Excel. And the built-in shareability is unsurpassed, of course … just create a web page with a link to it:

Num Sum lets you do that in about 30 seconds flat! Wow.

Dead, dead, dead simple.