Absolutely! Not often does a MS employee asks for my opinion on a product :)
The context was a group project working on a business plan. So we had our Word doc, Excel spreadsheet for pro forma statements, and the pitch slides.
Rendering:
I type at roughly 90 wpm and Word Online could not keep up, whole sentences would lag. This is on an i7 with RAM to spare. Also when around 5 editing sessions were open in Word Online, all the sessions would become extremely laggy in all operations.
In Excel, navigating around the spreadsheets with arrow keys caused the "active cell" indicator to lag. Sometimes I would arrow over five times and start typing and my typing would appear in the 3rd or 4th cell over from where I was typing.
Powerpoint would occasionally display text as black even though the font color was white. I used Segoe UI across the board and on some slides the font would be Segoe while on other slides the font would be a generic Sans Serif. Bullet points would also sporadically get out of line on a slide (imagine some tabbed in, others not) but would be in a straight line in desktop powerpoint. Similar to Word Online, when multiple editing sessions (~4) were occurring on one Powerpoint, the online version would become unusable due to lag.
Features:
Reading comments online is not a pleasant experience. I appreciate trying to save screen real estate by not displaying comments by default and then restricting them to a side bar, but it is extremely annoying to have to click each and every comment to see what it refers to in the text.
If I embed a Table of Contents in desktop Word it would be very nice to update it in the online version.
Our Pro Forma sheets in Excel were tightly coupled to our Word document. If I had both Excel and Word open on my desktop I could link the two and update the Word doc with changes in the Excel spreadsheet. The link would die when I closed the desktop versions; this link should still persist! Both documents live in the same folder on OneDrive.
A teammate was constantly complaining about some functions missing from Excel Online, I'm not sure how accurate his complaints were.
Editing online should have a Page Layout view; the option to change margins is included. It is tedious to go from editing -> viewing -> editing -> viewing to see how the page will look when printed.
General Annoyances:
If I deleted a table in desktop Word but another group member was editing the paper, the table would not delete when I "synced". Similarly with custom formatting of the auto-generated list of References.
Although teammates were "signed in" with a MS account, I would still see "$UUID is also editing" instead of their name. Similarly, comments made in Word Online from a signed in account would appear as "Guest".
Even though I have a lot of annoyances and it's not feature complete, 365 did make this project run a lot smoother than if we were using Google Docs because of the native Office integration.
Thanks for the feedback! Appreciate you taking the time to give me the details, it'll definitely help me pass the info on to the right folks so we can make the Office Online apps better.
Rendering related feedback:
I definitely hear you on these things and they're all on our radar (typing and active cell lagging switching and editing quirks in PowerPoint)
Features:
Commenting feedback - will pass that on
ToC - do you use headings/styles or outline view in the desktop version to create this? Is the navigation pane in Word what you're looking to see or the actual ToC?
Excel-Word linking - were you updating a few charts that automatically updated in Word or tabular information?
Re:signed in not getting names: sounds like this may be a bug, will have to check with the team
page layout - you can now update the margins in the editor without switching to view, but I definitely can see it's not an ideal situation to switch between the two
re:appearing as guest when commenting - this may happen if you have certain privacy/strip info settings on the document itself (we respect the setting the document gives us, and I forget the exact setting)
Other follow ups - was this a group project for school/uni?
Yeah, I created it using the headings and what not in the desktop mode. In the online version it would be nice to "update it". In the desktop mode if you hover or click on the ToC you get the update option.
> Page Layout View
It's not so much switching between the views as much as not being able to edit in Page Layout view. My whole life I've always done my typing/editing in Page Layout view and it's not an option online.
> appearing as a guest when commenting
Where do I go to see this permissions? I don't see anything regarding this in the file properties. The folder all the documents are in requires users to login to edit.
It's pretty hidden, so it's unlikely that you chose to do this but sometimes gets set if you downloaded a template from somewhere - In Office 2013 desktop (may be similar in 2010), go to File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Settings > Document-specific Settings.
For us opening word files with numbered or multilevel lists created in Mac Office 2011 was the problematic feature. These documents open in Online Word with either a) no list numbers (just as paragraphs), b) list elements with different indentation from the original document, or c) entirely different typeface or position for the numbers of the list, or d) all of a-c in the same document.
I don't know if compatibility with the desktop version for numbered or multilevel lists is important for many users, but in our environment (a law office) virtually every document we work with (legal pleadings) is almost entirely a numbered or multilevel list, so for us it rules out using Online Word right now.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll bring this up to my teammates that work on that part of the product.
In general, if you're trying us out and see something you don't like or doesn't work, the bottom right corner should have a button that lets you give us feedback (and yes, we are looking at it, even though there may not be a response).
The context was a group project working on a business plan. So we had our Word doc, Excel spreadsheet for pro forma statements, and the pitch slides.
Rendering:
I type at roughly 90 wpm and Word Online could not keep up, whole sentences would lag. This is on an i7 with RAM to spare. Also when around 5 editing sessions were open in Word Online, all the sessions would become extremely laggy in all operations.
In Excel, navigating around the spreadsheets with arrow keys caused the "active cell" indicator to lag. Sometimes I would arrow over five times and start typing and my typing would appear in the 3rd or 4th cell over from where I was typing.
Powerpoint would occasionally display text as black even though the font color was white. I used Segoe UI across the board and on some slides the font would be Segoe while on other slides the font would be a generic Sans Serif. Bullet points would also sporadically get out of line on a slide (imagine some tabbed in, others not) but would be in a straight line in desktop powerpoint. Similar to Word Online, when multiple editing sessions (~4) were occurring on one Powerpoint, the online version would become unusable due to lag.
Features:
Reading comments online is not a pleasant experience. I appreciate trying to save screen real estate by not displaying comments by default and then restricting them to a side bar, but it is extremely annoying to have to click each and every comment to see what it refers to in the text.
If I embed a Table of Contents in desktop Word it would be very nice to update it in the online version.
Our Pro Forma sheets in Excel were tightly coupled to our Word document. If I had both Excel and Word open on my desktop I could link the two and update the Word doc with changes in the Excel spreadsheet. The link would die when I closed the desktop versions; this link should still persist! Both documents live in the same folder on OneDrive.
A teammate was constantly complaining about some functions missing from Excel Online, I'm not sure how accurate his complaints were.
Editing online should have a Page Layout view; the option to change margins is included. It is tedious to go from editing -> viewing -> editing -> viewing to see how the page will look when printed.
General Annoyances:
If I deleted a table in desktop Word but another group member was editing the paper, the table would not delete when I "synced". Similarly with custom formatting of the auto-generated list of References.
Although teammates were "signed in" with a MS account, I would still see "$UUID is also editing" instead of their name. Similarly, comments made in Word Online from a signed in account would appear as "Guest".
Even though I have a lot of annoyances and it's not feature complete, 365 did make this project run a lot smoother than if we were using Google Docs because of the native Office integration.