Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
I’m rarely the one to try and be at the front of a news story, or to be “first!” That takes a certain something that I do not have – though I’m very glad other people do have it. But today, Microsoft announced the launch of its new browser-based Office applications, called Office Live, and quite frankly it’s a big deal. The apps themselves are awesome, and what they represent – the only “productivity” brand a lot of people know about moving online – is pretty awesome as well.
So first things first, what is Office Live? Essentially, it’s stripped-down versions of four of Microsoft’s best Office products: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote (a note-taking application that altogether too few people know about), that are all available online for free. You can create documents online, edit them online, collaborate with others, and share your documents on the Web.
So who’s it for, and what does it do? Let’s find out.
Everything, Everywhere
Office Live works in tandem with SkyDrive, another Windows Live program. SkyDrive is online storage, giving you 25GB of space to store your music, documents, and whatever else you want to keep safely backed up and available anywhere. With Office 2010 (or a little bit of trickery on older versions), you can keep your desktop’s files synced with SkyDrive, creating a Dropbox-like automatic sync and backup system. That means you can edit a file online and then immediately open the same, updated document on your desktop for more powerful, offline working.
Automatic, syncing backup coupled with 25GB of storage and full-featured editing tools for documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notebooks makes for a really good productivity system that’s accessible to you anywhere. You can even get at your Office Live documents from your smart phone by going to http://office.live.com, though all you can do at the moment is view them.
If you’re not into syncing your files, you can upload them manually into SkyDrive or send them as email attachments to the unique email address that every SkyDrive account gets. If you’re uploading files manually, you’ll want to download and install Microsoft’s Silverlight, which will let you drag and drop files to upload them. A tip: when you send files to someone, CC your SkyDrive email address to get the file online. That way, you’re not tied to your computer waiting for edits – you can do them quickly from anywhere – and you can easily resend the document from your SkyDrive.
Your New Mobile Office
Office Live by itself isn’t perfect, and none of the applications are anywhere near as fully-powered as their desktop counterparts – I would compare them more closely to Google Docs than to desktop versions of Office. But they’ll all do the job, and do it in a way that makes more sense to Office users: toolbars and options look like they do in the desktop versions, meaning there’s no new interface or workflow to learn.
It’s also, by virtue of being Microsoft-powered, more able to handle things that Google Docs can’t – sometimes when I upload a file to Docs, the formatting gets messed up or a table gets re-organized into oblivion, but that hasn’t happened to me yet with Office Live. It’s plenty powerful to do all the last-second editing of presentations and memos you might need to do, without throwing the whole kitchen sink at you. Which I’d be all for, but I guess you can’t have everything.
My biggest issue with Office Live is another “by virtue of being Microsoft” thing: there are a number of things about the interface I don’t really like. It takes too many clicks to create a document, for instance, and your documents are automatically thrown into folders, making them harder to find. The search on Office Live is actually really good, and I wish it were the default sorting mechanism instead of folders. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the interface, just a few things that take longer than they should.
Playing Nice With Others
Having finally had an office job, I can say officially that “version hell” – where everyone’s working with the same document but different versions so no one knows which one is the newest and everyone has different updates and suddenly there are 19 revisions of the same Powerpoint file floating around clogging up my inbox – is a very real thing. Office Live doesn’t have any particularly revolutionary features to help you combat that, but it does handle collaboration pretty well. Multiple people can work on the same document in real-time, with edits showing up together, and they can talk with the built-in chat while they work. Screwed something up? Version history lets you go back to the way things were.
Microsoft hasn’t done anything that’s incredibly different with Offive Live – it’s definitely intended as a shot at Google Docs without trying to do a million new things. What it is, though, is a great basic editor that plays nice with the files and applications you’re probably already using, and gives you a mobile storage and editing solution that works perfectly well.
What do you think? How does it compare to Google Docs, or Zoho, or OpenOffice?
(Hat tip to Lifehacker)
