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Investigating Online Office Suites
jcatcw writes "Computerworld reviewed four online office suites — Ajax13, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, ThinkFree Online and Zoho Office Suite. None has all the applications and features of Microsoft Office, but if you're looking for the core office applications in an access-anywhere format, at least two were surprisingly sophisticated. The article weighs the ability to save files to a centralized server quite heavily in its ranking. The winner is ThinkFree Office because it provides the most sophisticated features and has the best Microsoft Office compatibility. Zoho's suite is the second choice."
Read the first page and then any pages on that site after that had an error message.
I would have grabbed the article text. Maybe someone else can post it if they get through for others that get bugged.
Unsurprisingly, ThinkFree was chosen as their preferred "online" Office Suite. FWIW, ThinkFree is an amazing piece of software that blasted onto the scene back in '99 - '00. The most amazing part of it was how it so closely resembled Microsoft Office. Given it's age, it's no surprise that it "won" this comparison.
:)
Of course, there is a caveat. Thinkfree uses client-side Java rather than being pure-Ajax. This gives it a distinct advantage as the Java GUI tools are far more mature than the embryonic Ajax GUIs. Basically, it was a bit of an unfair fight. Which would bother me, except that Thinkfree Office is an excellent product, and deserves the exposure.
So if you find yourself with a need for a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software on the go, keep Thinkfree in mind. It may cost money, but it's quite a bit more convenient than a Linux LiveCD.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You would be AssUMe-ing too much. For the purposes of Ajax13, I'm fairly certain (based on their serverside messages) that they're using Jakarta POI to read Microsoft Documents. Thinkfree's development actually predates the general availability of OpenOffice and, I believe, uses their own in-house API. (Though I may be incorrect about that last part.) Google uses... whatever Google uses. I don't think the information on their backend is really available.
Long story short, there are more APIs out there than just OpenOffice.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I've also been using Google docs for a while now. Not the word processor, but the spreadsheet s/w. It suffices, but there are limitations that I would not be able to live with for most spreadsheet needs. For example, no simple way to address a full column or row, no way to do range intersections, no range naming, etc. I've lost data on more than one occasion when the backend lost contact with the server. It reverts back to the previously auto-saved version. I use it for one reason now: keeping track of billable time. I can live with the limitations in this case because I need to access it from several computers in several locations. Evenso, I may soon move the spreadsheet to openoffice.org and use a thumb drive for portability.
A good thing about the article is that it made me realize there may be a better alternative in ThinkFree.
If we are nitpicking, I think that makes it internet based. Web based would be WWW (World Wide Web), and I think you are almost necessarily talking about http et al then.
So ssh'ing to a computer with emacs will nto make it web based, unless you somehow rig the PC to offer you emacs in a web browser. Actually, no, no http, no web based app.
Check out this page on integrating Google Docs and LaTeX:
http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/research/googledocs.php