First look and review of Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta

Posted on January 6, 2008 at 7:20 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Online Office Suites series!

A few months back I had written about a new web service coming from Microsoft called Office Live Workspace, where you could store all of your Office documents online and share them with others quickly and easily. I also wrote about another web service called Doc Syncer, which allows you to store all of your Office documents online and edit them using Google Docs.

In this post, I’m going to give a quick breakdown of Office Live Workspace and compare it with other such services like Doc Syncer. Office Live Workspace is still in beta and is not available to the public just yet.

Office Live Workspace Review

The first thing you’ll notice about Office Live Workspace is the concept of a “Workspace”. A workspace is simply a place where you can add Microsoft Office documents, notes, and lists. You can view your documents in Office Live Workspace or share them with others you want to collaborate with. However, you CANNOT edit your documents online.

When you add a document to a workspace, such as a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet, you can only view a preview of the document online. If you want to edit it, you must have a local desktop copy of Office installed on your computer. The ability to edit documents online without the need for Microsoft Office was one of the features that I was hoping for.

Considering you can edit Office documents with Google Docs, it’s a shame Microsoft that you can’t edit Office documents with their online document manager. All you get is a preview of the document.

Currently, the only things you can do in a workspace is add a document, view a document, share a document, or create a new note, list, task list, contact list, or event list. Note that you cannot actually create any new Office documents through Office Live Workspace.

Creating Notes in Live Workspace

Creating a new note allows you to create a simple web document with basic formatting tools. You can use this to capture class notes, jot down reminders, or keep track of issues. It’s a very simple version of Word. It looks as if this “Note” application will eventually be upgraded to a full-fledged online Word processor.

Creating Lists in Live Workspace

The Excel equivalent is when you create a new list. In a list, you can add columns and rows kind of like a spreadsheet and you are given the option to export your list to Excel. However, you cannot enter formulas or use advanced functions like in Excel.

In a list, you can choose what kind of data will go into a column by clicking on the drop drop arrow next to the column name. Here you can choose whether you will enter text, numbers, dates, or a yes/no combo box. If you choose a particular type for the column, such as a number, Live Workspace validates the data and will only allow numbers to be entered into the field.

Sharing Documents in Live Workspace

Office Live Workspace also allows you to share your documents with others. When you are viewing a preview of an Office document, you can click the Share button on the right to share the document by sending someone an email or by sharing your entire screen out.

If you want to share your screen out with someone, you’ll have to install the Microsoft SharedView beta application. Live Workspace will automatically start up SharedView and allows others to see your screen.

If you share via email, you can control who can decide who can revise and comment on its contents, or just review and comment.

Notice that you can also add comments to a document that will then be visible to anyone you are sharing the document with. This is a very simple collaborative tool. In later versions, I’m hoping they allow multiple people to edit the documents online at the same time. Currently, you can share a document and have someone else edit it, but they will need to have Office installed on their computers, it cannot be done online.

You can also save versions of your documents if you like. Click on the Versions button and choose Save to Version History. You can then upload another file with the same name and overwrite the old file. The original version that you saved to “history” will still remain.

Finally, if you have Microsoft Office XP or later installed on your computer, then you can install the Microsoft Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office to integrate your Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta documents with Microsoft Office applications on your computer.

You’ll be able to open an Office document stored in your workspace right from your computer or you can open an Office document on your computer and save it to your workspace.

If you have Office 2007 installed, in your Office Word, Office Excel, or Office PowerPoint applications, click the Office button. The following Office Live options appear in the list:

Open from Office Live From your computer, open a document in your workspace.
Save to Office Live Save a document directly to your workspace from your computer.

Overall, it’s a good first step for Microsoft to at least put something on the web! I think that eventually they need to allow people to edit documents online that are compatibile with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. People will not use this service is all they can do is create notes and lists.

As for backing up your documents, DocSyner is still way better. It automatically scans your entire computer for all documents and uploads them in the background! Using Office Live Workspace you have to manually add individual files to a workspace. There’s not even a way to import multiple documents at once.

I think if Microsoft really tries hard, Live Workspace could be better than Google Docs, but they’ll have to let go of Office only being on the desktop and allow people to do everything online!

[tags]office live workspace, microsoft office online, online office, Microsoft office live workspace[/tags]

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Comments

One Response to “First look and review of Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta”

Adobe Share - Access and share files and documents online Says:

[...] of online Office or online document management suite these days! Just today, I wrote about the new Microsoft Office Live Workspace service that allows users to store and share Office documents [...]
January 7th, 2008 at 7:18 am