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Office goes Live

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 16:53

Simon Jones finds that, for a freebie, Microsoft's Office Live Workspace is a powerful web storage and sharing tool.

When you click the New Workspace button, you get to choose from 11 different workspace templates such as Sports Team, Essay, Household and so on, or else a simple blank workspace. Using one of these templates will pre-populate your workspace with lists and sample documents, although just how "useful" these sample documents will be depends upon how American and how anally retentive you are. Having last been revised in 2003, some of the samples are starting to look very tired, and don't exhibit the latest Office features, fonts or formats. I'd have to say that I'm getting equally tired of telling Microsoft that not everyone in the world lives in a city, has a "state" or "zip" code, or a phone number that fits the US format. You might have thought that in a world of ever-increasing globalisation that someone would have cottoned on by now.

You can invite up to 250 people to share any document or workspace, and each of those people can be assigned the role of viewer, editor or owner. The people you invite need to have Office Live Workspace accounts themselves if they're going to edit documents or workspaces, but you can choose to give them a read-only preview of your workspace and documents if they don't yet have one. You name people by specifying their email addresses, and you get to include a short personal message to be sent along with the instructions on how to access the shared documents - they'll then be sent an email message that contains a link for them to click to get access to the document or workspace you want to share.

Previews of Word documents and PowerPoint presentations look quite good through the Office Live website. Word documents show only a limited range of fonts in the preview but their colours, sizes and attributes - such as bold, italic and underline - all appear correctly. Tables of contents, hyperlinks and graphics all show correctly too, but you don't get to see page breaks, tracked changes, comments and such like. PowerPoint presentations don't show transitions or animations and its font support is quite limited, but most other things (including speaker's notes) show up in the preview. Images may not appear quite correctly, particularly if you've used Office 2007's image-editing capabilities to slant, shadow or recolour them, but they're there and in the right place. Disappointingly, SmartArt diagrams don't show up at all, only the outline text used to build them. Excel workbooks look worse in preview than Word or PowerPoint documents, with some definite problems in displaying charts - charts embedded in a worksheet often won't display, and will cause the cell to which they're anchored to expand as though the chart were completely enclosed within it, while charts on separate sheets may just show a blank sheet. Of course, once you get the documents off the website and into the appropriate application, all these problems disappear.

When several people all have editing rights to a document there's always the possibility that the changes they make will clash, and Microsoft has attempted to get around this problem by giving each person their own copy of the file when they open it for editing. Whenever someone saves their changes Office Live Workspace saves a new version of the file, and if two people make different changes at the same time Office Live Workspace will save two different versions of the file, but then it's up to the workspace's owner - that is, you - to decide what to do with these. You can choose to restore an earlier version, overwrite a previous version, delete a version and so on, and you can keep up to eight versions of each file. Regrettably, there are no easy tools provided for comparing or merging such versions: Word will do such comparisons, merging all versions and letting you see who changed what, but you'd have to get these different versions of the document out of Office Live Workspace manually. Excel has its own built-in method for sharing files and tracking changes, but you have to remember to turn it on before you save the file, and the required "Compare and Merge Workbooks" command isn't directly available from the Ribbon. (The command is also cumbersome and problematic to use, which is probably why it was hidden deep down inside Excel 2007.) PowerPoint has no equivalent command for either tracking changes or for comparing versions.