Neil McAllister pits three online productivity suites against the desktop version of Microsoft Office. Which will triumph?
A spreadsheet in your browser? A word processor on the web? If you believe Google, soon virtually all software will be web-based. Google offers a complete suite of office productivity apps that run in your browser, but it isn't the only one. A number of competitors are working on web-based suites, including Zoho and Microsoft. In addition to the typical features of desktop productivity suites, each offering promises greater integration with the web, including collaboration and online publishing features not available with traditional apps. But even with today's speedy browsers, can browser-based apps truly replace Microsoft Office for real-world work? We put Google Docs, Zoho and the technical preview of Microsoft Office Web Apps to the test. Google Docs No company is more focused on web-based applications than Google, so you'd expect its suite to be the best. However, the most amazing thing about Google Docs turned out to be just how woefully inadequate it is for serious work. When you log into Google Docs, you're greeted with a familiar, Google-style user interface: spare, reserved, understated; but while this elegant approach works wonders for Google's search products, it fails to disguise Doc's frustrating lack of features. Google added support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats in June but, even with the older Office formats, Docs chokes on all but the most rudimentary formatting. We found that anything more complicated than a simple column of text was distorted. A sample file created in Word 2007 revealed just how many features Docs gets wrong. Tab stops, paragraph spacing, page margins and placed images all move around indiscriminately. Curly quotes import properly, but that's actually a problem, since there's no way to type them in Docs. Revisions made using Word's Track Changes feature are jumbled together as plain text; the same happens for Comments. Page headers and footers are converted to inline text at the top of the document. Docs doesn't even preserve pagination. The same goes for Excel files. Basic figures and formulae are imported properly, but don't expect much else. Images are discarded, along with any formatting beyond simple cell sizing and shading. Charts embedded in Excel 2007 appear as big, white boxes labelled 'No Data'. Charts embedded in Excel 2003 or earlier, meanwhile, simply disappear. Docs' graphing engine is disappointing. There's no support for features such as trend lines and no formatting options. The output is hardly presentation-ready. Google Docs does an adequate job of preserving the basic look and feel of PowerPoint 2003 files but, again, it's a poor substitute for Microsoft's desktop suite. Graphics appear blurry and resampled, text moves around without warning and animations and transitions are eliminated. PowerPoint 2007 isn't supported. Despite its faults, Docs incorporates some intriguing ideas. If the goal was simply to mimic the current office tools on the web, Docs would be a miserable failure - but Google is looking at the bigger picture. In keeping with Google's idea of working 'in the cloud', Docs discards files and folders. Instead, it presents a chronological view of your documents. Similarly, Docs maintains an internal version history for each document, allowing you to revert to an earlier draft. Rather than simply recreating desktop apps in the browser, Docs is web-centric. You can import documents via email or from the web, or embed them in blogs or websites to share with the public. There's a user interface for embedding YouTube videos in your presentations. There's also basic version control to allow multiple authors to work on the same document. Forget paper; with Google Docs, it's all about sharing, collaboration and online publishing. Most of us in the real world have given up on the paperless office, so it's disappointing that Docs' printing is mediocre. As we noted earlier, it struggles with pagination - particularly where images come into play. Furthermore, fonts that render correctly onscreen may not print right, while graphics come out blurry and jagged. For all its ideas, Google Docs is missing so much that ijust about everybody will be disappointed in some way. Zoho Zoho offers a slightly different take on the online office suite. Zoho makes far more of an effort than Google to mimic the look and feel of traditional desktop applications. The results might seem more familiar to new users, but they also underscore the limitations of this strategy. One problem is that Zoho's offering seems to have grown rapidly, with little thought to consistency. A pull-down menu makes moving between apps simple, but the lack of a common interface undermines the illusion that this is an integrated suite. Zoho also encourages web-based publishing and collaboration. Here, its minor advantages over Google Docs include the ability to post to blogs directly, to generate a 'doc roll' of recent documents for embedding in a website, plus integration with EchoSign for digital signatures. Zoho is slowly implementing more advanced features, too. Its spreadsheet offers rudimentary support for pivot tables and charts, while the word processor features a very basic mail-merge facility. Most remarkable is the spreadsheet's elementary support for Visual Basic macros. But while the suite is adequate as a lightweight set of productivity applications, advanced users will be dismayed by its lack of sophisticated features and its half-hearted implementations of existing ones. Zoho's support for Microsoft Office file formats is better than that of Google Docs, but only slightly. Page layout and image placement in the word processor are questionable, and revisions made using Track Changes get corrupted. Support for Excel 2007 embedded graphs is a bit better than Google's, but the output is similarly disappointing. Imported presentations are reduced to static slideshows, losing their animated transitions. And, as with Google Docs, printing is unreliable, particularly where fonts and images are concerned. Zoho's suite is still in beta status, which may explain why it froze up more often than Google Docs. A page reload usually solves the problem, in our experience. Zoho's real strength is its breadth. It offers a whole range of back-office business apps, including groupware, conferencing, invoice management, project management and more. Most are free for a modest amount of storage space; for increased capacity and a greater number of users, Zoho charges a per-head subscription fee. Zoho could appeal to small businesses or organisations looking for a suite of applications that don't require dedicated IT staff to install and maintain. Although it seems unlikely that Zoho's online productivity apps will meet your needs as well as desktop software would, it's nonetheless a cost-effective alternative. Microsoft Office Web Apps Although Google Docs and Zoho are both flawed, Microsoft could hardly have expected to take the competition lying down. The software giant is currently in the process of finishing a web-based version of its Office suite, due to launch simultaneously with the release of Office 2010. Office Web Apps was available in technical preview at press time, but it's already shaping up to become a formidable challenger to Zoho and Google. Nowhere is this more evident than when you import your first document into the Word web app. Unlike its competitors, Microsoft's online suite reproduces .doc and .docx files with absolute fidelity. Fonts, page spacing, headers, footers, auto-text entries and footnotes all appear exactly as they would in the desktop version of Word. Images show up where they ought to, even when placed behind text. Documents that mix page sizes, or that alternate portrait and landscape modes from page to page, load correctly. And printing is flawless. The PowerPoint files we tried yielded similarly impressive results. Images retained most of their quality and text remained where it should. And, unlike Google Docs or Zoho, the PowerPoint app preserved animated transitions between slides. You'd be forgiven for assuming that Microsoft relies on ActiveX controls or other Internet Explorer (IE) trickery to achieve all this, but you'd be wrong. IE users are offered an improved file upload user interface, but everything else renders exactly the same in Safari and Firefox. But there's a catch. During the technical preview, documents imported into the online versions of Word and PowerPoint are read-only. Whether Microsoft can recreate the editing experience of its desktop apps remains to be seen. The Excel web app does allow editing, however, and the results are mixed. It reproduced Excel files with far greater fidelity than either Google Docs or Zoho. Multiple authors can open the same document simultaneously, and their changes are updated for all users in real time. Microsoft says a similar capability will not be available in the Word app at launch time. Disappointingly, there's no revision history feature. It's fairly simple to accidentally corrupt an entire worksheet with a few clicks of the mouse and, given that the document saves itself automatically at regular intervals, the Revert to Saved button wasn't much comfort. We're hopeful that this situation will improve as Microsoft's Web Apps suite matures. To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
