Microsoft Office Live Workspace Review
http://officelive.microsoft.com
They Say: Microsoft Office Live Workspace is your online place to save, access, and share documents and files. Use it to group related information for work, school, or personal projects. No downloads are required – just sign up and go.
I Say: Online document applications are starting to become more and more popular and as usual once one large company makes a presence(aka Google) the others (aka Microsoft) are sure to follow. A couple of years ago Google scooped up a great online document application and in their usual style added their own name and look and called it their own. This program, now called Google Documents has grown on me over the years and I use it when I find the need to share documents…in my line of work that’s not too often though. When I heard that Microsoft was getting ready to launch their own version of an online document editor I had to sign up and give it a try.
My first impression…ugly. Google Documents is nice, it’s quick, it’s easy and it works. Now, to be fair when I tested Office Live Workspace it was still in beta but there still is no excuse especially when you’re a large company like Microsoft. The software lagged(when I could log in) and besides from the very basic editing features it was pretty lame. First off, they call the documents “notes” which was confusing. When I logged in I wanted to start a new document but all I could find was ‘new note’, once I figured out this meant document I started a new one which was pretty easy. The layout and functionally is very similar if not identical to Google Documents so that’s a good thing. It’s pretty easy to use, if you’ve ever used a word processor before you will understand how to use Office Live Workspace.
You can edit documents, save, delete and share them much like Google Docs…with one nice feature that Google Documents has yet to get. Previous versions. This feature is great, it’s probably the only thing about Office Live that is worth using but it still has a flaw. The idea is after you save your document you can choose to mark it and by marking it you can return to(roll back) that version later. First, I shouldn’t have to tell the application to do this it should just do it. Every time I save(or auto-save) it should make a new entry, I should be able to see a history of 100 or so past changes to the document, I don’t think this is too much to ask.
Overall, I’m not too impressed with Microsoft Office Live Workspace. For a company that size and with great products such as Word and Excel you would think they could turn out something better than this. I’m assuming(and hoping) that most of these issues will be worked out with time, it is beta after all and maybe I will give it another look at then but for now I will stick with my Google Docs.
Pros
- It’s Microsoft, they’re not going anywhere
- It’s 100% online but works well with your local copy of Word
- It’s Free
- Great “history” feature that lets you roll-back
Cons
- Kind of sluggish
- Not a real replacement for your desktop word processor
- It’s Microsoft
Screen shots
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