Office Online: How does it stack up?

For my next few blog posts, I have decided to look at how each major company is approaching the new Online world.

This is all-encompassing. Users do not care whether something is EC2 clouds, HTML5, Ajax or whatever. So I cast my net wide to include "online things users have access to, that make their lives easier". There! Besides, we will deal with Enterprise Cloud offerings (such as Microsoft Azure) in another post.

This post will be about Microsoft and how it's online consumer offerings stack up.

As mentioned in my previous post, MS has been late out the gate with online services (just like they are always with any other new concept). This has always been deliberate, either because MS has underestimated the value of a new service, or because they prefer to look at what others are doing and better it.
This strategy comes a long way, from a time before the Internet. In a world without the Internet it is indeed a winning strategy.
In today's world however it has cost them time and time again.

One ongoing success for them has always been Office. It has been said in the past that if Windows were to fold and the entire world took to Macs, MS would still remain the richest company in the world because of Office sales. No one would say at this point that online editing packages are as good as Office on a PC, but it has also been said that most users do not need all that power. So, if you were a user, at home, faced with high-priced MS office on the one end, and a choice of free online editors on the other, would you choose the new online offering from Microsoft?

So I opened my Windows Live account and sniffed around. Sure enough in the office section I found this:

This is a kind of "workscreen" to get you started.

(Of course by the time I took the screenshot, I had started experimenting already).

Being an online service you do not expect to find enterprise level stuff here. Just Word and Excel. The inclusion of Powerpoint was therefore a nice surprise. Of course things like Access will be missing. OneNote was also a surprise, since most consumers won't really know what it is, but I suspect MS gave a nod to corporate road warriors with this one.

General points:

• The look and feel is very similar to Office 2010.
• Silverlight is required for proper operation. Since it is available for Linux it is not too much of an issue.
• Features seemed the same across all browsers and systems (an amazing feat for Microsoft).
• Copy and paste between the PC space and the Browser space is possible.
• Once you have opened a document, you can click a "breakout" button in the corner to open the document in a separate window. Since opening a document closes the Office workscreen, this feature comes in handy.
• Hovering your pointer above a document in the workscreen gives you some options for opening, downloading or sharing the doc.

On a whim I decided to start with Excel. I duly opened three spreadsheets in Three different browsers (over two operating systems) to compare usage. Chrome and IE8 on Windows, and Firefox on Linux.

This is what I found:

• IE8 had trouble with performance (even clicking on a cell took 2-3 seconds reaction time) whereas Chrome and Firefox were near-instantaneous. I suspect Gears had something to do with that.
• No graphing tools available. 
• Only embedded tables can be inserted. No graphics.
• No right-clicking on cells.
• Basic editing functions like Summing were missing, or the formulas for them had to be entered manually in the formula bar.

The last one irked me a bit. I expected things like external data links and Macros to be missing (and they are), but a simple Sum button is in my view a requirement even for an online spreadsheet. Without them, Dad will have a very frustrating time managing the family budget.
I suspect that MS expects you to Click the "Open in Office" button for the full experience.

Conclusion: Usable for quick work, but becomes cumbersome after only a short time.

On to Word:

This is what I found:

• All browsers seemed to perform about the same with online Word, namely Slowly.
• Basic Insert tools available, such as images and tables.
• A basic right-click menu is available.
• Styles and Formatting available.

Conclusion: Generally about as good as Wordpad, in other words more than good enough for Grandma.


On to PowerPoint:

What I found:

• A Presentation Theme Wizard greets you when you start a new document.
• The same applies for each new slides.
• Editing is not freeform. You cannot simply insert graphics or text everywhere. Instead the template for the current slide constrains it.
• As can be expected, advanced editing features like timings and sound are missing.
• You can view and play presentations full screen.

Conclusion: A chore to use. Might see heavy use as a quick stop-gap player, but even basic editing falls short in my view. Not even Junior would want to use it for school projects.


I did not look at OneNote really, since it falls outside the scope of an ordinary user.
Other productivity items such as Mail and Calendar are of course already covered by the Windows Live service, as well as instant messaging, document storage, sharing and so on.

So, does Microsoft's online tools meet the needs of the general user? The quick answer is no. A longer answer would be: Yes, but only if you want to get a quick job done. Grandma can write a quick letter to the bank, but Dad will find managing the family budget a bit of a strain. Mom will have no trouble writing emails to her sister in Live Mail (after all it has been running for how long?). Junior could write his book report, but Big Brother's term paper will take years to get done, and his graphs just won't have that "zing" to them since he will have to import them from elsewhere.

What about business users. Absolutely not. Tempers would flare in the office real quick. The only ones who would like this service are those wishing to view a doc online on the road, and most companies already have document management systems for that.

One final point. This is all still very new for Microsoft. Although this review may not be glowing, I would like to add that this might all change in the next few months, as MS adds more stuff and gets user feedback. All of what I've said here might be null and void in a year's time. I suggest you give this service a second look then, and I think I will do the same.