eWEEK Labs: Online apps lack bells and whistles, but get the job done

AjaxWrite, part of the AjaxLaunch suite, is a bare-bones word processor with which users can create, edit and save documents. One of the features eWEEK Labs likes most about AjaxWrite is that documents are not saved on a server. Instead, all documents are

Currently, AjaxXLS is only a spreadsheet viewer, meaning users can view spreadsheets but cannot manipulate or edit them. Still, we found that the viewer was able to preserve cells and formatting pretty well during our tests.

GOffice provides rudimentary spreadsheet functionality and features, but it gets the job done. We were able to import our test document into GOffice, manipulate the data and then download the document to our hard drive to view it in Excel. Only one proble

The biggest limitation of GOffice Word is that you cannot upload a document from your computer. You can, however, create a document and easily save it as a PDF, something that may not be so easy with Microsoft Office 2007 anymore.

One of the best features of ThinkFree is its ability to share documents-while controlling the permissions. When sharing, the owner of the document fills out the form shown here, and an e-mail is sent inviting others to view the document.

The ThinkFree WebTop is like a home page that allows users to view all of the documents they are working on, as well as start a new presentation, spreadsheet or word processing document.

Ads run along the right-hand side of the page in ThinkFree Write, but we didnt find them to be a distraction. With its similarity to Microsoft Word 2003, users may actually find ThinkFree Write more familiar than Word 2007.

For this evaluation of office productivity apps, we created all of our test documents in Microsoft Office 2003. Shown is the test spreadsheet we created for our productivity tests in Excel 2003.

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 nearing, we thought it important to show what our test documents would look like in Office 2007. This is our test spreadsheet in Excel 2007.

When Office 2007 is released, one of the biggest changes for end users will be the new user interface. Microsoft has added a ribbon in hopes of making it more intuitive, but some end users may be loathe to change.