[AI] ARE ONLINE OFFICE APPS THE FUTURE?
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
Re: [AI] ARE ONLINE OFFICE APPS THE FUTURE?
this is the micro soft pollicy because before office 2007 there are no open standerds for ms office file and microsoft not reweel properly at office 2007 microsoft not following the open offoce documents standerd which prescribe by w3c don't confuse with open office .org and open office documents standerd - Original Message - From: Sanjay ilovec...@gmail.com To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 8:19 PM Subject: [AI] ARE ONLINE OFFICE APPS THE FUTURE? 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
