Back in 2008, Microsoft announced Office Web Applications – the web-based version of its ever-popular productivity suite – Microsoft Office. We’ve come across more details recently, with the beta release of Office 2010: the online suite will be made up of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, will be capable of synchronizing with the desktop, will be platform and browser-independent, but will contain less features than the desktop versions of those programs. That should not be an issue, however, since most Office users use very few features in Office.
The suite will be available to everyone for free via Windows Live and to corporate users through different distribution channels. Since the announcement, such questions as “How would this affect Google Docs/Apps and the Zoho office suite?” have been widely discussed topics. Let’s take a pragmatic look at what we should really expect from Office Web Applications. Read more »
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Google Voice (GV) is the new version of GrandCentral from Google. It is a service that gives you one number for all your phones. Currently, it is only available to existing GrandCentral users, but it will be available to new users within the next few weeks. The service, in its current guise, is completely free, so you don’t have to worry about your wallet screaming at you. Google Voice comes packed with many features. The basic premise is simple: to start things off, you pick your own international number and register your existing phone numbers, be they landlines or cell phones. From there, you use your existing phones to call into GrandCentral, from which you can call the entire United States for free. For a nominal fee, you can make calls to the rest of the world. The rates are often less than traditional international rates and are more in line with what Skype charges for its international calls.
In late 2005, GrandCentral was founded by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet. Fed up with having to run to the other side of the house to answer the home phone, they wanted a way to take all their phones and voicemail in-boxes and unify the experience. In essence, GrandCentral never aimed to replace your phones, but to glue them together and give them more features, all to make your voice communication easier. In July of 2007, Google acquired GrandCentral for $95 million. The founders were happy to accept the partnership knowing that they could do more with Google behind them. Just a few weeks ago, Google officially announced Google Voice, which is the new version of GrandCentral.
So what exactly can Google Voice do for you? Read more »
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Dropbox – the awesome storage, synchronization, and sharing application – is getting some much-requested changes. In an email to current users, the Dropbox Team announced that it will be making changes to the service’s undo history, introducing a new feature called “LAN Sync,” and making numerous performance improvements. The team also announced the forthcoming of an iPhone app. Read more »
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Google Docs now supports uploading of documents in Microsoft’s most recent file format: the XML-based .docx and .xlsx that comes with Office 2007 (Windows) and 2008 (Mac). This means that whenever someone sends you a Microosft Office Word document or an Excel spreadsheet with a file extension that ends with .x, you no longer have to convert it to a .doc or a .xls format just to upload it to Google Docs. This also continues down the path of further removing the barriers of using Google Docs as one’s primary document-editing suite/repository.
No word yet on when Google’s online office suite will support .pptx files for PowerPoint presentations encoded in the XML goodness.
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Back in 2008, Microsoft announced Office Web Applications – the web-based version of its ever-popular productivity suite – Microsoft Office. We’ve come across more details recently, with the beta release of Office 2010: the online suite will be made up of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, will be capable of synchronizing with the desktop, will be platform and browser-independent, but will contain less features than the desktop versions of those programs. That should not be an issue, however, since most Office users use very few features in Office.