Online office apps get real

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

The question is: Are these three applications really ready to take on a desktop-based heavy hitter like Microsoft Office?
True challengers to Office?

Microsoft Office (primarily its Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications) has long been famous for including every possible feature, no matter how obscure -- and for imposing a hefty load of code on your hard drive to provide all those features, not to mention the heavyweight user interface it takes to support them.

Early versions of Web-based productivity suites tried hard to imitate Office, but they were at a double disadvantage: They didn't offer anything like the feature set of the Microsoft applications, and they were severely handicapped by what it was possible to do in a browser (in controlling the on-screen display of the text sizes and attributes, for example).

A couple of things have happened over time, however. One is that the programmability of browsers has been radically improved, beginning with AJAX techniques. Support for standards has improved as well (though there's still a lot of ground to be made up here), so that advanced tricks with cascading style sheets, for example, work more dependably across the available browsers and provide much better on-screen rendering of the documents.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine