More Office Online: Commenting, printing, Tell Me, and more | Hacker News Reader

More Office Online: Commenting, printing, Tell Me, and more

blogs.office.com

34 pointsbergie21 comments

Microsoft have done a great job bringing Office to all platforms of late. I'm not sure how many people here have used Office Online, but I've used it a few times and it is one well built application. Works just as fast as a native application, looks great and I didn't encounter any limits compared to that of the desktop suite. I used Google Docs for most things, but I will admit I think Microsoft have always had the better product on their hands.

I read something a little while ago that highlighted the fact Office is still very much a money maker for Microsoft (office environments and educational institutes love Microsoft Office). Quite clearly it makes sense a product that makes you a tidy sum should work on multiple platforms: more eyes = more money.

I think we are all witnessing a new era for Microsoft. Pushing Office far and wide for all devices and environments is a strategy they should have adopted years ago. Better late then never.

The problem with Office is not 'tablets', 'Google' or any of the usual claims.

We no longer write letters, we send emails. We no longer have todo lists in a spreadsheet, we use a ticketing system like JIRA. We no longer write book size documents with Word generated 'table of contents', we write blogs or put content into a CMS. We no longer print stuff out, we open the webpage on our phone. It is all change, and a lot more collaborative than originally envisioned in the pre-internet 'Windows for Workgroups' happy days.

Sure lots of people use Office and I doubt anyone can get very far without their CV being in Word format, however the world has moved on and Office is left in the past, from an earlier time when people worked and communicated in 'paperless office v.1.0.0'.

When I've done Office work in the "cloud" I almost always end up just opening the file in the native program and doing my editing there. All too often a key feature is missing from the 365 versions or rendering starts to severely lag.

Could you share some of those key features or which app (word/excel/powerpoint) is rendering slowly for you?

Absolutely! Not often does a MS employee asks for my opinion on a product :)

The context was a group project working on a business plan. So we had our Word doc, Excel spreadsheet for pro forma statements, and the pitch slides.

Rendering:

I type at roughly 90 wpm and Word Online could not keep up, whole sentences would lag. This is on an i7 with RAM to spare. Also when around 5 editing sessions were open in Word Online, all the sessions would become extremely laggy in all operations.

In Excel, navigating around the spreadsheets with arrow keys caused the "active cell" indicator to lag. Sometimes I would arrow over five times and start typing and my typing would appear in the 3rd or 4th cell over from where I was typing.

Powerpoint would occasionally display text as black even though the font color was white. I used Segoe UI across the board and on some slides the font would be Segoe while on other slides the font would be a generic Sans Serif. Bullet points would also sporadically get out of line on a slide (imagine some tabbed in, others not) but would be in a straight line in desktop powerpoint. Similar to Word Online, when multiple editing sessions (~4) were occurring on one Powerpoint, the online version would become unusable due to lag.

Features:

Reading comments online is not a pleasant experience. I appreciate trying to save screen real estate by not displaying comments by default and then restricting them to a side bar, but it is extremely annoying to have to click each and every comment to see what it refers to in the text.

If I embed a Table of Contents in desktop Word it would be very nice to update it in the online version.

Our Pro Forma sheets in Excel were tightly coupled to our Word document. If I had both Excel and Word open on my desktop I could link the two and update the Word doc with changes in the Excel spreadsheet. The link would die when I closed the desktop versions; this link should still persist! Both documents live in the same folder on OneDrive.

A teammate was constantly complaining about some functions missing from Excel Online, I'm not sure how accurate his complaints were.

Editing online should have a Page Layout view; the option to change margins is included. It is tedious to go from editing -> viewing -> editing -> viewing to see how the page will look when printed.

General Annoyances:

If I deleted a table in desktop Word but another group member was editing the paper, the table would not delete when I "synced". Similarly with custom formatting of the auto-generated list of References.

Although teammates were "signed in" with a MS account, I would still see "$UUID is also editing" instead of their name. Similarly, comments made in Word Online from a signed in account would appear as "Guest".

Even though I have a lot of annoyances and it's not feature complete, 365 did make this project run a lot smoother than if we were using Google Docs because of the native Office integration.

Thanks for the feedback! Appreciate you taking the time to give me the details, it'll definitely help me pass the info on to the right folks so we can make the Office Online apps better.

Rendering related feedback: I definitely hear you on these things and they're all on our radar (typing and active cell lagging switching and editing quirks in PowerPoint)

Features: Commenting feedback - will pass that on ToC - do you use headings/styles or outline view in the desktop version to create this? Is the navigation pane in Word what you're looking to see or the actual ToC?

Excel-Word linking - were you updating a few charts that automatically updated in Word or tabular information?

Re:signed in not getting names: sounds like this may be a bug, will have to check with the team

page layout - you can now update the margins in the editor without switching to view, but I definitely can see it's not an ideal situation to switch between the two

re:appearing as guest when commenting - this may happen if you have certain privacy/strip info settings on the document itself (we respect the setting the document gives us, and I forget the exact setting)

Other follow ups - was this a group project for school/uni?

Thanks for forwarding the information along!

> ToC

Yeah, I created it using the headings and what not in the desktop mode. In the online version it would be nice to "update it". In the desktop mode if you hover or click on the ToC you get the update option.

> Page Layout View

It's not so much switching between the views as much as not being able to edit in Page Layout view. My whole life I've always done my typing/editing in Page Layout view and it's not an option online.

> appearing as a guest when commenting

Where do I go to see this permissions? I don't see anything regarding this in the file properties. The folder all the documents are in requires users to login to edit.

> was this a group project for school/uni

Yep

It's pretty hidden, so it's unlikely that you chose to do this but sometimes gets set if you downloaded a template from somewhere - In Office 2013 desktop (may be similar in 2010), go to File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Settings > Document-specific Settings.

For us opening word files with numbered or multilevel lists created in Mac Office 2011 was the problematic feature. These documents open in Online Word with either a) no list numbers (just as paragraphs), b) list elements with different indentation from the original document, or c) entirely different typeface or position for the numbers of the list, or d) all of a-c in the same document. I don't know if compatibility with the desktop version for numbered or multilevel lists is important for many users, but in our environment (a law office) virtually every document we work with (legal pleadings) is almost entirely a numbered or multilevel list, so for us it rules out using Online Word right now.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll bring this up to my teammates that work on that part of the product.

In general, if you're trying us out and see something you don't like or doesn't work, the bottom right corner should have a button that lets you give us feedback (and yes, we are looking at it, even though there may not be a response).

So for the a/b - we just fixed some bugs that should fix those issues - thanks for the feedback there.

So this raises the question, especially in the context of the new iOS MS Office apps, when, oh when, will the MS Office apps for OS X be updated? It's a long time since 2011...

Sometime this year, most likely. OSX updates generally come out a year after the Windows counterparts (2003 and 2004, 2007 and 2008, 2010 and 2011).

Rumors say later this year: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/11/office-for-mac-2014/

I wonder if they're using something like Emscripten to get this so quickly out.

As recently as 6 years ago (when I was at MSFT), the Office codebase was pretty much all native (C/C++), some dating back to the early 90s.

FTA - > Office Online works great in all browsers, but for those of you who use Chrome, you can now add Word Online, PowerPoint Online and OneNote Online to your Chrome App launcher to create new Office documents online with a single click from your desktop

Looks like it's still a web app (not a NaCl/PNaCl port) that allows integration with the Chrome Launcher.

How? Where is this? I'm not seeing it. I'm also not seeing Office in the Chrome Web Store.

Search for the individual apps: Word, Excel, etc.

For example, Word is at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/word-online/fiombg...

An anecdote perhaps but Microsoft's Office online proposition is virtually unusable in the "outlook.com" form at least. I haven't tried 365 yet but I imagine the codebase is the same.

Even in its native browser (IE) it falls over with stupid rendering errors:

http://i.imgur.com/kLDQ0f3.png

And it can destroy an 8 core Xeon with a 5000 row 2 column sheet...

No thanks.

Edit: also I'm not walking into another ecosystem. After they shot windows live domains a few days ago which I and a number of people I know were using, we're out.

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