Engaging Commentary on Online Office Suites

With the rise of Google Apps and several other online productivity applications like Picnik (online photo editing software), you can now be more efficient with your work since more often than not, this generation is online most of the time.

But you know what?

I just had a bright idea.

Bear with me here and tell me if you follow what I’m about to say.

Wouldn’t it be really cool if these online applications could be translated into a package where you could use them even if you are NOT connected to the Internet? This “offline office suite” would be really handy in places where there is no Internet connection. You’d be able to write documents, do spreadsheets and edit photos without the need to go online. Isn’t that cool? I wonder why no one ever thought of that in the first place.

Now that’s a revolution!

*sarcasm mode off*

EDIT: For those who don’t get my sarcasm …

I’ve been using Web based applications since the launch of Meebo, Protopage and Writely (which was eventually bought out). Free apps such as this one serve as an alternative to Open Office but with the way the Internet works here in the Philippines, you’d be in for a lot more inconvenience than anything as consumer DSL can go down like an unexpected bowel movement. And as Veronica Belmont said in the last episode of TWiT, it is just so hard to re-learn another Office Suite when MS Office is just so engraved into our system already.

I steer away from Open Office for one traumatic reason. It saves files by default using a proprietary format which renders them harder to open in a non-techie environment. I had many scares as articles were submitted for editing using the Open Office extension and none of the editors had Open Office. The poor editorial assistant had to resave the file in a MS Word document format and resend, thus wasting everyone’s time. So there. No biggie in truth, but when you’re surrounded by people who are most familiar with MS Word (a microcosm example of why Microsoft still wins in the corporate environment), I don’t want to take risks.