A few months ago I “upgraded” Office on my Windows laptop at work to Office 2007. I know, I was using the older version for too long - but it was working fine, till it stopped.
A few months after the switch, I still can not figure out the disastrous Office 2007 user-interface changes. This is a huge step backwards in productivity for me. I keep staring at the huge buttons - 100 pixels tall of wasted space across the entire top section, in all office applications, the strange ribbon (what was wrong with the single line customizable toolbar?), and the unintuitive office button at the top that hides all the useful stuff - it all seems like a move designed to give a sense of “need” to the Office suite, without a real benefit to the user. It clearly seems like Microsoft was trying to desperately make it look much different, in the false pretense that “different” == “improved”. Not so.
This week I actually stopped using word on Windows and moved to WordPad just because of the slow speed and bloated and useless user interface. I know its way too simplistic, but you know what? For editing RTF files, with some headers and fonts, you don’t need more then that.
Surprisingly for me, the Office 2008 suite on the Mac is actually one of the most polished, fast and beautiful applications I have ever seen from Microsoft. Not only it is on par with every other Mac application in terms of sleek-factor, fast-loading and intuitive to use, the user interface stayed true to the original menu paradigm throughout the lasts years, and did not change for the worse as in the Windows version. My guess this is due to the strict UI guidelines developers respect in the Mac application world.
On top of that, its elegant and beautiful. There are many small touches that are hard to notice without a careful one to one comparison - like the nice shading in the active cell in Excel, the beautiful fonts in all applications, or the more useful page layout in Excel. The Mac version of Excel is becoming one of my favorite applications on the Mac.
My suggestion for all the Office power users - try Office on a Mac. You will not believe this is a Microsoft product.
Anyone that uses more than one computer would stumble pretty soon on the issue of syncing files between them. Especially when you try to be organized - you need your documents, media, configuration, and basically, life - available on every machine you frequent.
Of course, many people opt on the new philosophy, Living in the Cloud. Every day now it becomes easier then yesterday to have all of your data in the cloud: GMail, Google Docs, Pandora, Hulu, you name it. This method works fine most of the time.
Personally that is not how I want my life to be. There are many issues with keeping your data elsewhere - no internet connection, or provider server down (happens to all, even the mighty G). Being locked out of your data is a scary proposition, and for me not an option.
I opt on the other approach - keep my data local, but automatically replicate it across all of the my machines. This allows for immediate access to the data, plus the non-obvious but huge benefit of backup and automatic restore - in case of a catastrophe on one or more of your machines, your most important data is already backed up everywhere.
In the past I used Folder Share, that became Windows Live Sync once they were bought by Microsoft. I stopped using it once the application chocked on a folder containing more than 10K files. Also, the way to configure it is quite crude, where you have to login to the website, add machines, add folders, define permissions and connect them together. Arggh.
Enter DropBox. This is by far the simplest, hassle-free, most automatic and smart solution to folder syncing. It just works.
With DropBox you create a folder that is automatically synced to their server as you change it. Then, when another computer installs DropBox and uses the same dropbox account, its DropBox folder gets synced with any changes from the server. From this point on both folders continuously replicate each other.
It could not get any simpler then that.
There are many amazing little things this little service does so well. For instance, when you add or change a file, the file icon has a small sticker that shows its syncing, that changes to a green check-mark when its done. Of course, on all platforms you get a small floating notification once all files were synced to your current machine. Another thing: If you happen to work on the same file at once on both machines, you get a collision notification for you to decide which version to keep.
I use a Mac at home, a Linux workstation at work and a Windows laptop in between. DropBox works seamlessly on all operating systems, and its quite amazing to see your new note created on Windows, edited on Linux and immediately viewed on your Mac.
Did I mention its free?
I use it for several specific features:
- Keep all my archived files available always
- Centralize my notes and ideas flow
- Sync my passwords through encrypted files (Password Safe)
- Publish massive files for external consumption (a unique feature of DropBox for file sharing to non-DropBox users)
The iPhone app is out for a few months, and its another neat way to get to your data on the go. Sadly it is read-only, which means you can not add or change a file. If they would enable text file editing through the app, DropBox will become the killer note-taking app on the iPhone, as nothing can beat editing a note and having it immediately available on all of your machines.
Usually I tend to shun free services, but the business model is to hook you enough so you will need more than the free 2 GB provided in the free account. A 50GB package costs $10 per month, and 100GB for $20. This seems like a fair price to me for such a huge feature, and its clear that somewhere down the path I will have more than 2GB of data to sync…
All the best, DropBox: Keep up the good work. I wish that more applications would be like that - elegant, simple and just working.