Hi,

I’ve been asked this before, so I thought I would share this today.  I don’t use Google Apps, so I don’t have personal experience of the services, however I work with companies who employee’s choose to use the services – often because they can’t access the corporate environment from home or have file size limits that stop them. 

Anyway, I do use Word, Excel and PowerPoint and I use quite a lot of the features in my documents (e.g. the book and reports in Word, my personal finance spread sheet in Excel and numerous presentations in PowerPoint).  I’m fussy, I like my documents to render the same, no matter what device I’m accessing them from and especially when I’m presenting.  I’ve always seen the differences when they are shared with products other than Office and have been known to spend a couple of hours fixing them up once they come out of the “other” services.  People ask me why I stick to Microsoft, this is one of the reasons.

Today I saw this - http://bit.ly/tSedOC – it has a document available in Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365.  The nice thing is that I can edit both on the web.  Only one renders correctly and only one comes to my PC for full control with all functionality maintained.  I’m sure you can guess which.

Now I expect some people to say “but Office 365 is charged for”, which is true, but as a consumer I can use the features of the web applications on SkyDrive for free.

Have a look at the site, you may be surprised.

ttfn

David