Thursday, September 13, 2007

Cool Google Docs & Spreadsheets Alternatives

I have been using Google Docs & Spreadsheets for a while but I think it lacks a lot of features and it's quite slow. I recognize though that it's great for real-time online collaboration. There is still a lot of work to be done so I can forget MS Office or OpenOffice office suites.

One of these days I decided to try Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet and I was very impressed about it. It offers more features than Google Docs & Spreadsheets and it has a MS Office like environment with which I felt very familiarized. Now check this out: they have this Zoho plugin for MSOffice that lets you open your Zoho-online-stored documents inside MSOffice Word and Excel! And the changes you make while using MSOffice are reflected to your Zoho-online-stored documents. That is great and it actually worked because I have tried it!

When I thought I had seen them all I found ThinkFree. Their slogan or perhaps their vision goes like this: "the best online office on earth". It sounded promising and I signed up to try it. I chose to create a new word document and when I realized I thought I was inside MSOffice Word because the webapp interface was just like it! Remarkable stuff! However while using Thinkfree dashboard (folders and files management) I found some glitches which help me remind they are still offering their online office suite under beta stage.

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