Mark Lyn­der­say

Be­cause I'm cussed, it seemed like the best way to test Mi­crosoft's new web ap­pli­ca­tions was to take the ser­vice right out of its com­fort zone us­ing Google's Chrome web brows­er run­ning un­der Ubun­tu 9. That's just the kind of guy I am. I spend a fair amount of my time us­ing soft­ware, work­ing with ei­ther dig­i­tal imag­ing tools or a word proces­sor, and hun­dreds of thou­sands of words lat­er, I'm kind of fussy about the soft­ware I use to write.

The first draft of this col­umn was writ­ten in the Mi­crosoft Word Web App, which turns out to be a pleas­ant sur­prise. It's the first time that I've writ­ten in a ver­sion of Word since 1998 that doesn't feel like a sledge­ham­mer pressed to the task of swat­ting a fly. The soft­ware in­her­its the rib­bon bar of its disk-based coun­ter­part, and the stan­dard rib­bon of­fers a daunt­ing num­ber of tools for font con­trol, para­graph for­mat­ting and styles along with sen­si­bly pre­sent­ed but­tons for op­er­a­tions like cut, copy and paste that are use­ful if there are prob­lems in off­beat brows­er en­vi­ron­ments.

That's why it's so sur­pris­ing to find the large save but­ton hid­den in the file menu at far left, a pop-down op­tion that ob­scures much of the writ­ing area when it's open. There's a tiny flop­py disk icon above the file menu that al­so trig­gers a save, along with swoopy lit­tle ar­rows that un­do and re­do changes (on­ly one in ei­ther di­rec­tion). It's de­cid­ed­ly odd that these crit­i­cal icons aren't ac­cord­ed the same text iden­ti­fiers that oth­er ba­sic func­tions get in the tool­bar. The place­ment makes sense once you re­alise that you can hide the rib­bon bar and get an inch of hor­i­zon­tal space back for your writ­ing, but the icons, while no doubt im­me­di­ate­ly recog­nis­able to reg­u­lar Of­fice users, de­serve some ex­pli­ca­to­ry text.

And that's where most of the prob­lems lie with the Mi­crosoft Web Apps. They are faith­ful, de­tailed repli­ca­tions of the desk­top soft­ware they are based on, but they run in a brows­er and have a se­ri­ous­ly trun­cat­ed fea­ture set. Giv­en that, the rib­bon bar seems a bit gra­tu­itous, since there isn't that much to ac­cess. That said, there are some cu­ri­ous and in­ter­est­ing ad­di­tions, like a spell check­er that lists 18 ver­sions of Eng­lish to guide your search for er­rors, one of which is, ev­i­dent­ly, cus­tomised for a Trinidad and To­ba­go ver­sion of the lan­guage. Set­ting aside the stu­dious and large­ly un­nec­es­sary repli­ca­tion of the Of­fice in­ter­face, Mi­crosoft's Web Apps suite, free on sign-up to the com­pa­ny's Win­dows Live ser­vices of­fers ca­pa­ble, if stripped down ver­sions of fa­mil­iar prod­ucts at a price that's hard to beat.

Mi­crosoft needs to do some more us­abil­i­ty test­ing, putting com­mon (and in a brows­er, nec­es­sary) tools up front and cen­tre with prop­er la­bels set­ting aside their ro­mance with their tool­bar rib­bon. This web soft­ware suite is a dra­mat­ic im­prove­ment over an ear­li­er ver­sion I tried, but Mi­crosoft may have gone too far in teth­er­ing the user ex­pe­ri­ence of the free on­line soft­ware to their paid soft­ware. Any­one who cur­rent­ly us­es their desk­top Of­fice prod­uct will keep butting their heads on the low ceil­ing of fea­tures that char­ac­terise this min­i­mal­ist ver­sion of the com­pa­ny's mar­ket lead­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty suite.

Ed Note:

An ex­tend­ed ver­sion of this col­umn is post­ed at: http://lyn­der­say­dig­i­tal.com/bd/10.html