Using Online Office Suites

Don't have any office suite on your PC? Don't worry. Try these online office suites that will give you the same functionality and features over a Web browser

Sunday, February 04, 2007

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If you don't have any office suite installed on your computer, here are some free online alternatives that give you similar functionality. In this article, we'll take you through four online office suites-Google Docs and Spreadsheets, AJAX 13, Think Free and ZOHO Writer. You must be concerned about the security of your documents/files when on their servers. For this, all of them claim they are encrypted and only an authorized user with username and password can access them or those who have been granted exclusive rights by the owner. All these applications are
Firefox and IE friendly, except AJAX13 which supports only Firefox. These online office suites have most of the features and tools that you would need to create word documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The best part about these online applications is that you can logon to their respective websites and sign up for free to start using them. You can import/open all commonly used file extensions, work on them and export or save them in PDF and many other formats.

Except AJAX 13, the rest can store files online to help you access them from anywhere around the globe.

A great feature about these online applications is: after creating a document you can publish it on the Internet for others to view. AJAX 13 lacks this feature too. In Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well as ZOHO writer, you can grant exclusive right to other users who can access view or edit your documents. But keep in mind those users also need to sign up for an account if they do not have one before accessing the files. Moreover one can post documents on blogs like Blogger or WordPress except in AJAX 13. Multiple documents can be opened at once in the same window in AJAX13 and ZOHO writer whereas this feature is not there in the other two. All applications have the print preview feature where you can preview your documents. The superscript and subscript tool is a great addition to the online processors, which is quite helpful if someone wants to jot down numerical values, which is common to ZOHO and ThinkFree. You can also add hyperlinks to documents in ZOHO, ThinkFree and Google.

For us, Google Docs and Spreadsheet took the least time to open up, just 47 secs followed by AJAX 13 which took 57 secs and then came ZOHO and ThinkFree at 1 min 52 secs and 2 min 7 secs respectively. We tested all applications on a Reliance connection at 115.2 Kbps.

ThinkFree
(www.thinkfree.com)
This is the most feature-rich online office suite of the lost, but it's still in a beta stage.There are two ways to edit a document in ThinkFree-'quick edit' which has only basic set of tools such has font styles alignment, etc. and 'power edit' which has all the tools. Creating folders is an effective way of managing files available in ThinkFree. It consists of the three applications-Document Editor, Spreadsheet and Presentation.

ThinkFree Presentation

Add or hide slides, choose color schemes or templates you want to give to your presentation and create slideshows

Word Document Editor: Besides basic document creation and editing, this one lets you add ClipArt, as well as images from your computer or Flikr.com or the clipart library on ThinkFree. The online word processor comes with horizontal as well as vertical rulers, which are less common with other online word processors. You can also check the word count of the document, add columns, etc.

Spreadsheet: This lets you add different types of pie and bar charts, which are missing in the other three we checked. You can save your spreadsheet in XLS and PDF formats. There is a 'find and replace' tool feature, which is quite useful for quick search and replacement.

Presentation: Helps create fast and effective slideshows and even hide the ones which you don't want to show in the slide- show. You can even choose from the default color schemes or can add your own to the already listed ones, which are accompanied by many templates to be used in your presentation.

ThinkFree Doc Editor	ThinkFree Spreadsheet
Add clipart to your documents or check the spellings in your document with the spell check tool	Choose from an array of charts, which you can add to the spreadsheet which is present in ThinkFree by default

Google Docs and Spreadsheets
(www.docs.google.com)
This is a two-in-one application by Google, where you can add spreadsheets to your document with ease. It is one of the fastest loading online suites and you have the option of just viewing the word documents or spreadsheets. Style menu is quite useful for a quick addition of different styles to your document, which include page spacing and headers. Of all those we checked, this adds images fastest to an online document. You can also leave comments on the documents/spreadsheets wit special rights or also add tags to filenames.

Google Docs & Spreadsheet

Add images to your documents with ease and choose from various styles like text formatting and page spacing

ZOHO Writer
(www.writer.zoho.com)
This application has an easy to use WYSIWYG Editor. You can choose to hide or unhide the tools on it. The suit has 19 font types that support a maximum size of 36 and 5 style types. Moreover, you can add multiple layers with the insert layer tool, which is helpful while editing or creating HTML pages. You can toggle between the normal view mode and the HTML script mode with the toggle HTML source tool. Quick format tool is great if you want to add borders to the document and the thickness, style, border color, border background color and padding of the border can also be controlled. In ZOHO you can also e-mail your word or HTML files to your account.

ZOHO Writer

Add images to your documents with ease and choose from various styles like text formatting and page spacing

AJAX 13
(www.us.ajax13.com)
It has four parts as discussed below.

AjaxWrite: Here you can do basic things like create, edit and save word documents, add multiple tables, superscript/subscript words, align/change fonts, and preview the document.

AjaxSketch: It is similar to MS Paint. The toolbar on the left hand side of the screen has all the tools to add/edit shapes and text to the sketch file. Simply create the sketch, save as SVG file and drop it into any document. Even after resizing your sketch, it won't get distorted and lose its crispness.

AjaxPresents: This is a complete slide creator in which you can open your existing PowerPoint files and edit them. Besides inserting N number of slides you can add shapes, lines, align them and bring shapes forward or send them back of one another in the document. You can store up to 1 GB of data.

AjaxXLS	AjaxWrite
You can open your pre-created XLS files in this Web utility and just view them, as it is only a viewer	You can add superscript or subscript to your documents and Web view them to see how they will look if viewed in a browser

After you have designed your slides, you can publish them on the Web by sending request e-mail to emailpublic@publishPPT.com. You can not only sketch/skew various shapes, but also add as many shapes to slides as you want. Moreover, you can bring them forward or send them behind another shape.

AjaxSketch	AjaxPresents
The ajaxSketch application is similar to MS Paint, but creates files in SVG format	Add multiple slides and shapes as needed. You can position the slides they way you want and sketch/skew the inserted shapes

AjaxXLS: This is the application in which you can just view any pre-created XLS file in MS Excel or similar software.

Conclusion
Online office suites are slowly gaining popularity. There are many others available online, but so far these four are most usable.

Sulabh Puri

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