Taking your Office documents on line
Microsoft may lead in some areas, but in others it's just catching up. But when it does catch up, the results can be impressive. We take a look at Microsoft's new Office Web Apps.
05 August 2010
In the on-line document-editing arena, Google has been growing an impressive market share. And when we say impressive, we mean impressive: more than 25 million users and 2 million businesses use Google Apps - the paid version. Even more people are using the free version.
That might sound impressive but, according to Gartner, Microsoft Office still has 94% of the market - with the vast majority of its sales going to small businesses.
What's interesting is that Google Apps are gaining market share, while Microsoft Office is losing. Last year, Google Apps gained 5% market share and Microsoft Office lost the same amount.
It's easy to see some of the reasons why. Google Apps is pretty cheap: just £33 per user, per year. That gives you e-mail, calendar, word processor, spreadsheets, drawings, presentations, groups, intranet-type websites and video hosting. It's all automatically multi-user, too, with a fair slice of user collaboration. And, it includes all infrastructure costs, since Google hosts all of the servers. Apart from your desktop, that's your total cost of ownership - with just a little administration and management required. There's 25GB of storage per e-mail box and 99.9% uptime. Of course, you need to be on the Internet all the time to use it - but which company isn't these days?
All of which sets the scene for Microsoft to enter the market - which it did in July of this year, when it launched its Office Web Apps.
We decided to take a look at the Microsoft Web Apps, to see how they compared with Google's more established offering.
First impressions are good. It has to be said that Google has a very folksy design ethic, which you either like or you don't. We tend to feel that it makes the Google Apps suite look a tad unprofessional. Not so with the Office apps - the applications do a pretty decent job of looking like their desktop counterparts. Each application has a ribbon which looks very similar indeed to those you'll find within Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (the only applications currently available).
This is great for people who are Microsoft Office-trained - since everything is pretty much where you expect it to be. When you dig a little deeper, disappointment sets in - not because the apps aren't functional enough but because there's a fraction of the power of the desktop programmes.
This is really on a par with Google Apps - which themselves only have the features that most people need and not the kitchen-sink approach of the desktop version of Office.
Push the disappointment aside and you'll be pleased to find that the Office Web Apps are actually easily functional for most day-to-day/casual use. All the major features you'd expect are there - certainly enough to compose letters, documents and so on.
You'll soon come unstuck if you rely on more advanced features. For example, Word doesn't even include a word count, rendering it useless for many writers.
Office isn't alone in this respect - the feature set isn't a mile off what you get with Google Apps. This bears testament to the notion that most people don't need the advanced features that bloat much of the software they use on a day-to-day basis.
So, Word gives you basic text editing - including formatting (bold, italic, alignment and so on) but also some richer features, such as styles, tables and clip art. While there may not be a real depth of features, what's there works very well indeed - for example, there is excellent control over tables, allowing you to insert rows and columns far more easily than many browser-based editors.
With Excel, it's much the same story. Don't expect the advanced features of Excel, such as pivot tables and 3D charting. But, for straightforward spreadsheets and flat file databases, it's more than adequate - with a decent amount of control over layout thrown in.
PowerPoint is again limited - but adequate for most needs. As with the desktop version, a slide theme (selected from a smaller selection than the desktop product, but still adequate) controls the layout of the whole presentation. However, where as Word and Excel may be limited but adequate, the Web-based PowerPoint app does struggle to provide enough features to make its use worthwhile. For example, creating a slide is easy, but changing the slide layout (say from title to section header) isn't.
The final app in the suite is, surprisingly, OneNote. Not that OneNote isn't an excellent application - it is, and in many ways one of the most innovative things to come to Office in years. It's just that - well, there's no e-mail application or calendaring application. Google Apps can be pretty much everything you need - but without e-mail and calendaring, Office Web Apps can't.
OneNote is a good stab at creating an on-line version of a rich application. It's again limited, really able to only hold text notes - unlike its desktop cousin (although you can insert tables, pictures and clip art as you can in Word).
Performance is OK without being amazing - but a lot of JavaScript processing power has gone into replicating the appearance of the desktop applications, so that has to take its toll. It's very robust, though. You quickly come to rely on how solid it is and forget that you are working in a browser.
It's hard not to come away from Office Web Apps without a feeling of disappointment. What's there is solid - but there's really not quite enough there for a business to make it their desktop computing platform. But, Microsoft has done the right thing in making it robust - more features can be added later.
It will be very interesting to see what happens a couple of years down the line. Google Apps may be more established, but it's not been developed at an especially fast rate - if Microsoft puts some momentum behind its Web Apps and adds Outlook, then it could become a force to be reckoned with.
