Microsoft's Web-based Office goes live | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Web-based Office goes live

news.cnet.com

12 pointsChirag23 comments

To try them: http://office.live.com/?docsf=1

They are pretty impressive. A bit slow and far from feature complete, but definitely in the same league as Google's suite. If Microsoft keeps their foot on the gas, they may be able to block Google's assault on Office.

EDIT: I heard that they would have support for rendering 100% of offline Office's documents/features. Is that still true? Would those parts of the documents simply be read-only online?

if they are to implement such a feature, I guess they'll put up a "download IE to use Office Live offline" or some msg of this kind. Like how they made silverlight :)

Thanks for the link - CNET made it impressively difficult to find in that damn article!

Did a quick trial run: Word, Excel seem alright, but my primary use-case - OneNote sync'ing - is finally addressed :) Now I don't have to futz around anymore with the slightly clumsy (but honestly kinda nice) implementation of Live Mesh to keep my OneNote notebooks sync'ed between work and home machines!

I'm getting a "Complex Document: Optimise editing in Word" type message, suggesting they might not be completely confident in 100% of the offline features yet?

And on a large document it is a lot less usable currently, not just within the document but the interface to, seemed quiet snappy on a short document, IE and FF seem about the same, bit faster in chrome (about the usual amount).

I'm surprised their not using this to push silverlight actually, seems like a good way to prove it's worth.

(Disclaimer: I worked on the Word Viewer Web App last summer)

One of the things I think differentiates this from Google Docs, albeit for a small subset of users, is that equations created in the rich client's equation editor are rendered in the viewer (it just so happened the only Word doc I have on Sky drive is a problem set). Most people won't care, but it's pretty nice if you do use it. My pet use case: If you keep your stuff on Skydrive (I don't...yet) and need to print from a non-Windows machine, it's nice not to have to have emailed oneself a PDF generated by the rich client.

Being able to edit the equations would be great, but perhaps unsurprisingly, that's beyond the scope of the 1.0 release.

This was my take at the time it was first announced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703627

It's a shame they went with Sharepoint as host for the business version, but meh.

I have to say the interface is pretty nice; it would have creamed the last version of Google Docs, but I think the recent docs updates levels the field a lot (to be honest, they really feel like two different offerings anyway - I like the current version of Word for "fancy" documents and docs.google for hardcore writing).

Having Powerpoint in the cloud is brilliant, on the other hand the lack of word count in Word is annoying.

All in all mixed results; I am guessing things will expand rapidly.

They're cannibalizing their biggest cash cow just to compete. They must be terrified.

Not really - I expect this will simply replace Works. I would expect that the really big cash cow is large organizations buying a complete set of client licenses (for Windows, Office, SharePoint) through Enterprise Agreements.

I'm not sure I agree about the cannibalization. I see the web apps as more of a value-add than a full replacement for Office. I probably wouldn't want to use the Word web app to create an entire document (unless I had no choice), but it's super handy for making edits/fixes from a machine without Office.

I guess I don't see why MS would do this at all if they didn't see it as an eventual Office replacement. Acclimating users to web-based Office apps tangentially benefits Google by validating its approach. So restricting web Office to lightweight auxiliary functionality for the native Office mothership seems like a loss for MS. I think they're going all in.

I think it's a matter of retaining mindshare vs. Google Docs. The Office web apps are seen as complementing (and complemented by) Office.

I think you need Word installed on your computer to use this. And it probably requires I.E.

Works reasonably well on Firefox 3.6.3 + Windows 7 Professional.

Unless I am missing features; it works fine for me on Chrome under Linux (that's about as far away from your proposed requirements as you can get :))

It is almost ironic that you spread FUD[1] to discredit a Microsoft Product. Your statement is plain and simple wrong.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Its not out of fear its just that Microsoft Docs with Facebook required Office installed when I tried it. MS Adcenter(https://adcenter.microsoft.com) still requires requires Windows. Try adcenter from linux you get a non-supported pop-up. Its good news if they support all browsers with this product.

In Chrome, it's somewhat less impressive than Google Docs. Here is the entire user experience for me:

Browser not supported To sign in to Windows Live Account, try upgrading your browser. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, please install the latest version. If you are using another browser, try upgrading to the latest version of the browser.

Chrome 5.0.375.55 and it works for me. But it is not as snappy as google docs are.

Well, interesting. Less features than Google Docs has, but I'm afraid people will like it simply because it looks more like their Office 2007/2010 :(

They'll have much less work than Google Docs in convincing users to use it. meh.

What are the main features that are missing? for me its the collaboration (docs.com has a 'wall' feature on each document, but not quite as good) but certainly the formatting seems better (or am I missing something on Google Docs? no styles etc)

What features is it missing?

The main strength of Google Docs is Gmail integration. This is, arguably, more powerful than tighter Office compatibility (which is one reason that Microsoft wanted to do Docs.com with Facebook).

Do they permit using this office live version in business?

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