A Seasonal Blog

A Comparison of Two Web Office Suites: Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs

Office 365 Word looks like Word 2010

   I had the good fortune to try Office 365 when it was in beta, and to be honest I did not like it. It is modeled after the MS 2010 Suite with its good software, but there is something about the web that makes it feel too work unfriendly. Maybe it is because I remember the days when while at work I had lost work due to slowdowns or shut downs of the Internet connection. One can work on a document within a standalone word processor come what may, unless the computer crashes. That was also a real possibility for years, so finally word processors developed auto-save. It is one of those ideas that everyone thought of at least once, but then someone important finally thought of it. 

    After years of using the WWW, I should have confidence in the operational parts of it.  It is true that Outlook online is a very good idea, but a document may take many hours and I thought to myself that leaves an opening to maybe losing work. When you click the File selection, there is no Import selection, and if you try copy and paste, it will strip all the formatting, leaving ASCII text. Now let me try to do the same in Google Docs:

French police searching for body find 2.2m catfish

AFP – 14 hrs ago

Police investigating a report of a body being dumped in a river in France's Loire region made an unusual discovery...

    Google Docs makes the same unforgiving error. Google File menu drop-down has many more choices, but is missing a Save As choice. Save as means a lot to me, because to keep organized I have to drop material into the correct place. What if I took the same news article and copied it out of WordPerfect and pasted it into MS Paint? Now it looks like the original news story in .jpg form:

    So the text could be captured and transported as a picture, I could not do this in Word 365. My guess is that you are supposed to do all of the work online in the 365 web workspace. Really I can understand that, and in some ways it is a good idea, but right now Google Docs are doing one better. Now I want to name the document and save it in both web programs. Yes, the news story hit me so hard because of what I expected and what was at found at the site was so different it really broke me up. I was laughing so hard I thought I really might die! So I am going to name the Doc, prepare it and send to the address you gave. Microsoft 365 was so easy, I just clicked the disk and it saved the document.

The Start page of Office 365 is trim and efficient