I keep saying that the single most interesting thing about the iPad is the touch-centric interface that Apple gave its iWork word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool. But judging from the experiences folks are having using iPad iWork with OS X iWork, there’s clearly a big opportunity for companies like DataViz and Quickoffice to come up with iPad suites that focus on desktop file compatibility above all else.
Tag Archives | Office Suites
Google Apps Gets an App Store
I’m at Google for one of its Campfire One developer events. There’s a campfire and a tent–even though we’re indoors–and a piece of significant news: The company is introducing Google Apps Marketplace, which is both a portal for business apps and a set of tools that let third-party developers integrate their wares with the Google Apps services.
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Google’s Web Clipboard
Google has given its Docs Web-based suite a much-improved clipboard that lets you retain formatting when you cut and paste information between the apps. Very cool–and a reminder of just how far Web apps have to go before they get even all the features that everyone deemed essential in desktop software a couple of decades ago.
Wouldn’t it be cool if Google made its clipboard an open standard and invited Web-productivity competitors such as Zoho and SlideRocket and…even Microsoft…to support it, too?
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Quickoffice’s Cloudier Approach to iPhone Office Suites
Quickoffice–which was the first office suite for the iPhone–is now the first with a very cool feature: built-in support for Google Docs. It’s part of Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite 3.0, which was announced this week at Macworld 2010.
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A Little Closer to Gdrive: Google Docs Stores Files of All Sorts
People have been talking about Gdrive–a theoretical online storage service from Google–for eons. It still isn’t here, but Google keeps tippy-toeing towards offering the functionality we all assumed it would have. Back in November, the company started offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa at dirt-cheap prices. And now it’s announcing that it’s letting users of its Google Docs online productivity suite store any sort of file in their Google Docs Web-based repository, not just ones that work with the service’s applications. That makes Google Docs into a virtual hard drive/backup solution of sorts, for the first time ever. The new feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.
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Microsoft Extends 50% Windows 7 Discount
Sometimes Microsoft’s biggest competitor is itself. Huge numbers of businesses are still using Windows XP, and Microsoft is acting aggressively to migrate them to Windows 7 by extending a promotion that offers Windows 7 and Office 2007 for half price.
Windows Vista is by many accounts a better operating system than XP, but nearly 90 percent of businesses bypassed the upgrade, and opted to stick with Windows XP, because it was “good enough” for them. Office XP presents Microsoft with a similar problem.
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Microsoft Loses Word Court Case
Microsoft has lost the court case brought by a small Canadian software company over the custom XML feature in Word, and must remove it from Word by January 11th. According to Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet, Microsoft’s got a strategy for removing the offending functionality from Word 2007 via a patch. I wonder how many companies depend on Word’s custom XML–and how they’ll feel about it disappearing?
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Office 2003 Rights Management Bug Locks up Files
UPDATED: It’s a nightmare scenario: Imagine coming into the office and not being able to access any of your organization’s vital documents. That scenario became reality today for an untold number of Microsoft Office 2003 customers who use Microsoft’s Rights Management Service (RMS), a technology for controlling access to documents.
Office 2003 users receive the error, “Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator,” when they attempt to open or save protected documents. The bug affects Office 2003 products including Excel 2003, Outlook 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Word 2003. It does not affect Office 2007 or Office 2010 Beta, according to Microsoft.
A spokesperson said that the bug was caused by a Information Rights Management (IRM) certificate expiring.
Microsoft has posted a bulletin to TechNet alerting customers to the problem, and says that it is working “as quickly as possible” to provide its customers with a solution. Further announcements will be posted to the blog.
Microsoft released a hotfix on Saturday. The Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update is required for hotfixes to be installed.
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5Words: Office 2010 on Your Smartphone
Details: Office 2010 for phones.
Office 2010 scheduled for June.
Black Screens of Death: isolated.
Consumer Reports ratings: Sorry, AT&T.
Microsoft and Silicon Valley: friends!
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Microsoft Opens Up the Office 2010 Beta
At its PDC developer shindig in Los Angeles, Microsoft is announcing that it’s putting Office 2010, which isn’t due to ship until the first half of next year, into a public beta. You can download the whole beta right here, and if you’re an Office user and are curious what’ll be new in Office 2010, the beta is worth a look. (You can install it alongside an existing earlier copy of Office and leap back and forth, although in my tests, my copy of Office 2007 briefly launched its install program whenever I returned to it after having used Office 2010.)