2013年2月13日水曜日

Trying Microsoft Office 365 for Editing Word Documents

I've been looking for a way to edit microsoft word documents without having to carry my laptop PC.  Sometimes I need to carry different PCs than the one I've got Microsoft Office installed and I work on docs with.  I've tried Google Docs, which is okay to me for viewing and editing new docs.  Recently I  figured there's a service called Microsoft Office 365, so I decided to give it a try.  Today I used it for one hour with Google Chrome, which I think is a supported environment considering I didn't see any message stating otherwise.  Here's how I felt as a beginner.

Now I just wanted to edit some word documents that's already been formatted.  I expected the Word app from Office 365 to be fairly compatible with Microsoft Word, but it wasn't so enough, at least to me.  I imported a Word document and I could view and edit easily.  It seems OK except for 3 things:

1. It doesn't have a function to copy format from one part to another.
I only used it for an hour, so I might have just missed it.  Couldn't find it anyway although I use the function often on Microsoft Word.

2. IME input failed after using the Word app for several minutes, and I couldn't type anything in Japanese (came back to be functional after I closed the app and reopened the document).

3. Web view, which is my favorite one, was not available.  Not that I necessarily want to edit web pages, but when working with a laptop I'd like to make use of full screen width for editing.

To me the 3 functions above are very simple (don't know if it's hard to implement them well here) yet important.

I'll probably try to continue to use Microsoft 365 for a while and see if it get's any better if I get used to it.  So far, I don't feel it's whole a lot better than using Google Docs to edit documents and finish them with ordinary Microsoft Office apps.  I imagined Microsoft Office 365 to be more compatible with the desktop products in terms of design and basic functions.  As for me, it is a bit disappointing not to be able to just quickly modify and finish documents online.  Again, it might be just because of me not experienced with the online apps...


Microsoft Office 365: http://www.office365.com/