Microsoft went live with Windows Live Skydrive, the competitor to Google Docs which lets you edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations. Too little, too late – a familiar comment on MS’s efforts these days. Here’s a quick look at the Word web app.
The promise is that we’ll be able to seamlessly move between viewing and editing docs with the high-powered and well-known MS Word and with a lower-powered browser version. The web app is pretty, and has a usefully familiar interface, but it is a long way behind Google.
Some of the shortcomings will be fixed, but some are non-trivial and others are showstoppers for many businesses:
- most users are now back to 1995 in terms of losing unsaved work: docs don’t autosave, we know how bad people are at saving and, whilst Word 2003+ is pretty stable, browsers aren’t…
- if you share an unsaved doc you lose unsaved work without even a warning
- there’s no collaborative editing
- it doesn’t let you edit the paragraph styles
- the version history is very clunky
- there are no comments, table of contents, footnotes, headers, footers, margins
- if you upload a word file and edit online, you create a second (editable) online copy alongside the first (uneditable) online copy: confusing… really good for version out-of-control snafus
- it doesn’t work well on all browsers
Amusingly, somewhere in the version history, my Google Docs account grabbed control and threw an error saying it couldn’t show the doc. Play nice, boys!
