Microsoft kicked off a developer conference earlier this week. The Verge writes about a very cool set of forthcoming productivity features.
Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids - The Verge
Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents.
Microsoft calls its Lego blocks Fluid components, and they can be edited in real time by anyone in any app. The idea is that you could create things like a table without having to switch to multiple apps to get it done, and the table will persist on the web like a Lego block, free for anyone to use and edit.
This is obviously very cool, but it’s the next part that gets me excited.
Fluid is designed to make those tables, charts, and lists always feel alive and editable, no matter where you create them and regardless of how you share and copy them into other apps. Instead of getting a static and dull chart you copied from Excel, you’ll get a chart that can be edited anywhere you paste it, and you’ll see everyone making edits as they happen. That might be in the middle of an email chain, in a chat app like Microsoft Teams, or even third-party apps eventually.
So certain parts of Office documents can be shared between multiple spaces, or with multiple users, across multiple apps. If I am understanding this correctly, I can instantly think of 25 ways this could make my job easier. Here are a few...
- Copy tasks from a Microsoft To Do project called Field Trip into an email to my music team and have everyone check off tasks in the email as they do them. Status of those completed tasks syncs back to my project in To Do.
- Say I am logging a spreadsheet of student concert attire orders and I need some data for a few choir kids. I can copy and paste just those cells, email them to the choir teacher, he can fill out the data right in the email, and I watch as it syncs back to my spreadsheet.
- Similar to that last one. My school district sends me an updated list of recommended private teachers. I email just the flute teachers to my flute students and it stays up to date when the data is edited by those who maintain the list.
- No more putting the same student names in multiple different documents. I can have one Word document that acts as a primary roster. All concert programs, student lists, sectional roster documents, etc. are just snippets of text from my primary roster document, that automatically update when I update the primary roster. No more misspelled names, inconsistency, or duplicated work.
- Various data from documents can be clipped into media rich notes in OneNote where I can access them alongside one another without thinking about document management. For example, a short list of Concert Attire tasks could coexist in the same note as a portion of a payment spreadsheet, and both could update in real time when I edit their respective documents in To Do and Excel.
For the reccord, I don't use any of Microsoft's apps as my default tools, but I can certainly see myself using them more often if I can leverage this kind of power out of them.
Some questions I have:
- Will this be web only or will it eventually roll out to Microsoft apps on all platforms?
- Will Microsoft stand alone apps like Excel continue to exist or will they be replaced with one app (like the iPhone which now has an "Office" app that combines features of the whole suite)
- Will this actually catch on with people who are used to saving files to places on their hard drive? It seems ahead of its time.
- Will it compete with Google Docs? Someone needs to. Google Docs gets a only a few things right, but they get them really right, and that's why I think it has been so pervasive. Personally, I would far prefer that my work and personal circles relied on great native apps like Office.
- Will third party apps be able to embed the modular Microsoft elements inside of them, create modular elements to be able to insert in Microsoft docs, or both?
- Would Apple ever consider participating in this framework with their iWorks apps? Would they recreate their own version?