Ever think how hard it is to share your MS Office files online? Need to collaborate with your peers to edit Office files? Exchanging emails are the only way to go to share and collaborate on Office files in the past. The idea of online collaboration has been around for ages, but it’s not that easy to build a web application like MS Office. However, with the current web2.0 technology, all of those obstacles have being answered. But are there any online collaboration services that can manage to have the same features as MS Office? To answer the challenge, WorldTechLogic presents ThinkFree.
ThinkFree is a web2.0 ajax based online collaboration service for MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint softwares. With ThinkFree Online, you can schedule tasks, keep track of tasks, create elaborate invitations, publish files for everyone to see, create Microsoft Office compatible files (MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint), view the revision history of a document with the ability to roll back to its previous revision, and post your documents to your blog or web page, or publish them on the web. For each ThinkFree Word, Excel and PowerPoint, there are 2 options which you can choose from: Quick and Power Edit.
Quick Edit is a fast lightweight document editing tool based on AJAX which does not require launching Java. Quick Edit allows you to edit office documents in your browser with basic edit features such as tables, insert images, add links to websites in your document. Please note that Quick Edit is a HTML based tool with limited functionality. When saving documents in Quick Edit, some information created in unsupported features might get lost. Power Edit, on the other hand, has greater compatibility with Microsoft Office applications and includes a more robust set of features including clipart, spell check, insert images from Flickr (online photo management site), editing documents with complex formatting, creating spreadsheet, presenting slide shows, etc, along with some of the more popular features people have come to depend on. The likeness of ThinkFree’s Power Edit option to MS Office is amazing. Bottomline is, you can do pretty much the same thing with the power edit as you do with MS Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint softwares.
We have tried out ThinkFree Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which you can found by clicking HERE (Word), HERE (Excel), or HERE (PowerPoint). For a quick peek of all ThinkFree’s Office application, below are the screenshots for them (in Power edit mode):
ThinkFree’s Word
ThinkFree’s Excel
ThinkFree’s PowerPoint
Overall, our experience with ThinkFree has been amazing. Almost every features, if not all, on Word, Excel and PowerPoint exist in ThinkFree’s Power Edit feature. You will be shocked to see how ThinkFree is a dead-on alike with MS Office. WorldTechLogic had posted several MS Office ajaxed online collaboration services in the past, such as: Zoho Show, Zoho Sheet, EditGrid (XLS), and AjaxWrite. But none have the dead-on looks and features of MS office as ThinkFree. Compared to Yugma, a web2.0 service that actually shares your desktop with others, ThinkFree is definitely better since you will be sharing your files online via ThinkFree’s server (plus, you will be sleeping better as well, knowing that your desktop is safe). We highly recommend ThinkFree for you to use.
To signup for a ThinkFree Premium Beta account, you can click HERE!
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Besides Thinkfree, EditGrid is another robust and powerful online spreadsheet which designed for real collaboration by its Real-time-Update (RTU) capability.