Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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I wrote about Office Live a while back, reviewing it with an eye toward interoperability with the “real” Office that I write about regularly. It was a dismal failure then (2006) — because it did not in any way leverage the work product (Word, Excel, Access or Outlook) on the desktop (and it still barely does).

I will say that another look promises synchronicity with Outlook, in terms of email, contacts, and presumably a calendar.

But let’s examine a real world application of how a small business might want to actually use Office Live, and how its web site responds as compared to its open source competitor in the Web App space, Zoho.

A friend contacted me and asked whether I could build a web site for her new boss in the real estate field — ironically my first case study for InformIT when I began this column was about “Surrealty.”

After disclaiming about my limitations as a designer and programmer, I looked at their one page brochure site and figured I could do better. From a brief discussion it was obvious that their main focus would be showing their most recent listings and updating that with maximum efficiency.

i.e., a database... I next ascertained that they were in fact running MS Office, so even though they are a small shop with little tech expertise (no IT department) their listings would be in some electronic form which I would eventually want to put online.

I wanted to avoid using a standalone application that would require their learning it to manage the site — so I decided against Dreamweaver and MS Expression.

Instead I decided to take another look at Office Live. As of now there are two offerings, both free for a limited period. One is Office Live Workspace, a SharePoint like repository for collaborating and storing files, and Office Live Small Business, which I hoped would be perfect for what I wanted to achieve.

In the “Learn More” section of Office Live Small Business there was nothing (nada) about what I really wanted to know — namely how does an MS Office user leverage existing data, even in Word, in an Office Live web site?

Figure 1

Ditto the FAQs — wouldn’t a rational person think that if someone was using Microsoft Office and opted for a product called Office Live that there might be some information on how they work together?

As I said earlier there was supposedly a feature for synching stuff with Outlook, but here’s the page I found in the peer discussions area on synching Outlook.

Figure 2

Ouch! Nothing but problems there.

I decided to see what was going on with using an Access database or Contact Management application.

Figure 3

Double Ouch — seems like it doesn’t work, gets corrupted and fails, even with an Access runtime that is supposed to work with Office Live.

So I decided to do the obvious, ask this question of their Help department.

My question: Is there a way to connect parts of the web site with a database in Office — either in Excel or Access or either Word — either to populate the database with a form on the web site or to populate the web site with records from the database? I see no such reference or documentation in your information. Thank you.

To me, this would be the most obvious feature to include in Office Live, or at least to address.

Their response: a link to an unresponsive web page, an absolutely not a single mention of an Office program, Excel, Word, Outlook or Access — and no way to easily reply to the email!

Figure 4

Here was the result when I resent the email Help request:

“I sincerely apologize that the previous responses left an avenue for ambiguity and did not address your concerns completely. Based on your information I have received, I understand that you want connectivity of your website with Microsoft Excel, Access or Word. I realize how this is important for you.

I have gone through the complete email and I would like to inform you that this feature is not available with Microsoft Office Live Small Business.”

So, bottom line — in the online small business application named Office Live there is no way to connect to content already in use in your desktop version.

Zoho, my web apps option, has two online database programs.

Figure 5

I decided to pose basically the same question to them, this time asking how I might display the results in my own web page linked to the applications.

Now mind you this is an online database similar to Access or Excel, so web access is already built in — but here is the explanation:

“Yes, Kindly follow the below steps to embed your Table/View in Zoho DB & Reports anywhere in the web.

Create and Save the View in Zoho DB (Table/Chart View/Pivot View/Summary View/Tabular View)
Click on the toolbar icon 'Publish'. Click on the submenu 'Embed In Website/Blog...'
From the opened dialog Use the link 'Click Here' to enable the access for the view with/without login
Copy the HTML snippet and paste it anywhere in the web."

If I wanted a user to populate an online ZOHO database application using a form on my web site, is that possible, and again if so how?

"No, Currently there is no form available. But we are working on to support URL based API (on priority) which would allow you do the put/pull data into your Zoho DB & Reports database. Once this is available you could build your own form based application and use the APIs to push or pull the data into Zoho DB from your web page.”

Could it get any clearer and direct?

Both Zoho apps, and I believe even Office Live can accept *.csv Excel files as well, so you would have the option to upload data on one or more occasions, but of course this could become cumbersome.

Apparently the Add On for Office Live for ecommerce (StoreManager) accepts *.csv format, but I found no reference for contact manager, so presumably you will still need to add your contact manually or futz with the synchronization tool for Outlook that may or may not work properly.

So which online application would you use?

I will keep you posted as the project takes shape.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

New Web Tools for Writers (Zoho)

Web 2.0 2008 in San Francisco

Books and eBooks

PCs: The Missing Manual (Safari section on tech support)

Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP (Safari section on tech support)

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