back to article Microsoft offers Google-esque multi-meddling options in Office Web Apps

Microsoft has added joint editing capabilities to Office 365 apps. The company announced on Thursday the fact you can jointly and simultaneously with colleagues edit Word Web App, PowerPoint Web App and Excel Web App. Microsoft promised you could see where colleagues are editing text and formatting so you can avoid changes …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Ted Treen
    Unhappy

    Hmmm...

    Since it seems to be widely acknowledged that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, I dread to think what a document will be after "Team Edit" has had a go at it...

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Hmmm...

      It is just possible that a few brave individuals have, in the past, written collaboratively, and done so successfully. Not using Office Web Apps, true, but they had other obstacles to overcome.

  2. Tom 35

    includes find-and-replace in Word

    What will they think of next?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So....

    I'm here in Blighty and someone else is in say Baikonour, someone else is in Ushuaia and the 4th member of the team is in Amman

    Anyone like to guess how long we'd last trying to edit the same document at the same time? All those latencies would make it impossible.

    This might be find if you all have decent connections with little latency but.... I can't wonder if this is nowt more than 'Me Too'.

    * I have been to all four places on business in the past year.

    1. Test Man

      Re: So....

      Who cares? No one's forcing you to use the feature. It works... and works well.

  4. Jordan Davenport

    I've used that feature in Google Docs before for a university class group project, mostly while sitting next to each other in a computer lab. Each of us took a different section of the research project and created one document simultaneously. Sure, we could've just had four separate documents that we combined into one at the end, but this way, we were able to monitor the content the others were working on as they entered it and try to keep to an overall theme and tone. If we had any questions or comments, it could be clarified immediately.

    That said, that's the only time I've ever used that feature, mainly because I prefer to work on documents locally, not in the cloud.

    1. Test Man

      I use this feature a lot at work. We've just moved to Google Apps and it's incredibly useful to be able to work on a document without having to retrieve it from someone else and without having to hope that that person doesn't have it open.

      Of course you can work with your document the regular way - locally. This is just another feature that you can use or not use.

      Just tried it with Word (desktop app) on a Office 365 University sub and Word Web App having the same document open at the same time - works exactly the same as it does with Google Apps.

      Brilliant.

      1. Roger Greenwood

        Yup, also used this feature in 2005 (google docs) as part of a group assignment. Works brilliant in those cases. Now we use google docs all day, every day, at work, shared between up to 10. It is very rare you want to change exactly the same thing at the same time so latency not really a major problem.

        Just hope MS get it to work as well as google have.

  5. timhowarduk
    Thumb Up

    Cool

    Good stuff. It certainly beats the old-school method of emailing the document to 16 people in turn and trying to make the MS Office "Track Changes" thing do what you expect it to...

    Whether Microsoft's first bash at this will work as well as the longer established alternative will be interesting to observe.

  6. Listman

    Soooo, shouldn't google sue them to get back their money from android :-P

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like