Webware

File delivery service YouSendIt announced Thursday that it has released a plug-in (download) for Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 that will allow users to send any file from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to recipients through the company's service.

Based on my testing, the plug-in, which requires registration to download, works quite well. After surfing over to the company's plug-in page, which is already populated with other plug-ins for iPhoto, Outlook, Photoshop, and others, I downloaded the file in seconds.

Once installed, the plug-in embeds itself in Microsoft Office. On my version of Office 2007, I found YouSendIt's plug-in added under the "Send to" menu, allowing me to send a file through the YouSendIt service without requiring me to surf to the company's page.

As soon as I was ready to send a file and clicked the "YouSendIt" button, the company's Express software (download) popped-up immediately, asking me to input my username and password. Once complete, the process mimics YouSendIt's online version: I input the e-mail address of the recipient, decided how long the document should be preserved for, and sent it. A progress bar displays how much time is left before the document is sent.

There's not much to the YouSendIt plug-in. In essence, it provides you with another alternative to send files. And although I usually send documents and spreadsheets through Office's "Send to email" feature, YouSendIt's plug-in came in handy when I needed to send a large PowerPoint presentation that the recipient's e-mail couldn't handle.

Just like the online service, the recipient receives an e-mail containing a link to download the file, which saves them some valuable in-box space.

Overall, the process to send files was quick and I didn't recognize any lag time between starting the process and completing the file transfer. That said, YouSendIt capped the file size limit at 2GB, which might upset those who need to send huge PowerPoint presentations. But for most us, 2GB is more than enough.

YouSendIt's Office plug-in isn't necessarily a "must have" tool, since I found that more often than not, sending e-mail through Word or Excel is sufficient. But because there are larger files that sometimes crop up, it doesn't hurt to have it installed just in case.

The Office plug-in is available now on YouSendIt's site as a free download after registration. You can also download it from CNET by following this link.

Any time I hear a company reference their product as a "YouTube for _____," I cringe a little. Newcomer iCharts said the same thing about its charts product at its presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference this morning. The service takes your data from spreadsheets and turns it into charts that are both hosted on the site and can be embedded elsewhere, including things like PowerPoints, message boards, and PDFs.

What makes iCharts less worthy of the YouTube cringe is that it's a solid business model. As billionaire panelist Mark Cuban pointed out, you can leverage out this technology to other companies that want to make their charts suck less, making a quick buck as a service provider instead of ending up as a destination site for orphaned sales charts.

The service has a few tricks up its sleeve, including a building tool that lets you drag and drop data sets from a centralized document list. You can add as many sets as you want as long as the X & Y data axis match up. This comes with a live preview of what your charts will look like on the site, letting you see how it looks before hitting the publish button.

Also included is search engine optimization and the option to leave short audio annotations that can be attached to each chart. These clips follow it along wherever it goes, even on PowerPoint presentations, which means you can put together a pretty slick presentation that plays itself without using any other sort of narration software.

The service is launching later today with the tools to upload and build, along with a portal that shows off user charts that have been set as public.

You can adjust what you're seeing with the slider on the left. All the data on this chart is also SEO friendly, making your data accessible on major search tools.

(Credit: iCharts.net/CNET Networks)

Zoho continues its quest to build the most comprehensive online productivity suite, adding support for macros and pivot tables in its spreadsheet, Zoho Sheet.

The new version includes support for Visual Basic (VB), the scripting language used for Microsoft Excel for macros, said Raju Vegesna, Zoho's chief evangelist. Zoho built its VB engine independent from any Microsoft code, he noted.

"This means your existing macros will now work in Zoho Sheet. This makes Zoho Sheet the first online spreadsheet to understand macros. Even OpenOffice doesn't understand VB macros," Vegesna said in a note about the new features. Google Apps doesn't support VB script either.

Users can import Excel macros into a Zoho spreadsheet. The Excel functions are converted into Java and executed in the backend, Vegesna said.

Zoho's support for VB is limited at this stage, however. Only about 50 percent of spreadsheet functions available in Excel are supported, Vegesna said. In addition, exporting and recording of macros are not yet supported.

In addition to allowing businesses to bring their Excel macros into Zoho and vice versa with some limitations, the VB engine also gives Zoho a way to build macros that cut across a variety of Zoho applications, which include Writer, CRM, and Creator.

"The plan is to extend the Visual Basic engine to other apps," Vegesna said.

Zoho Sheet supports a subset of VB functions, including about 50 percent of spreadsheet-related functions.

(Credit: Zoho)

Pivot Tables & Charts brings the capability to create pivot tables and pivot charts via a drag-and-drop interface. This feature has already been available in ZohoDB.

(Credit: Zoho)

Other features added to Zoho Sheet include sharing spreadsheets within a group; support for named ranges; allow for hiding formulas in public spreadsheets; import of 100,000 rows of data from CSV files; tab separated values file support; and versions in Czech, Bulgarian, and traditional Chinese.

Zoho Sheet is free for individual users and is availabe as part of the Zoho Business Suite, which is priced at $50 per user per year.

Here is a video from Zoho, demonstrating the macro and pivot table features:

Microsoft issued a security advisory late Tuesday that malicious attackers are targeting versions of its Office Excel with vulnerabilities.

Microsoft Office Excel 2003 with Service Pack 2; Excel Viewer 2003; Excel 2002; Excel 2000; and Microsoft Excel 2004 for the Mac are affected by the security vulnerabilities, according to the advisory.

People who open a malicious e-mail attachment or visit a malicious Web site may find that their systems are compromised and that arbitrary remote code is executed. Computers configured to allow the user to have administrative user rights are at greater risk that those with few user rights on the system.

Microsoft said it is still investigating the security vulnerabilities but noted the attacks appear to be targeted and not widespread, according to its security blog.

Microsoft is stepping closer to providing anywhere access to Office files. The free Office Live Workspace (more here), which lets people share work in Word, Excel and PowerPoint online, is expanding today to invite more beta testers.

You can sign up to try the work in progress at OfficeLive.com, although access may not be immediate. A final version is set for next spring.

When Office 2007 debuted nearly a year ago, it seemed curious that Microsoft offered no easy, one-click option for accessing work from the Web. Meanwhile, Zoho built an add-in for Office 2007, as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other tools allowed people to share as well as compose work within a browser.

The free, ad-supported Office Live Workspace is a bridge to Office software, not a browser-based replica. Workspace synchronizes changes made to files stored both on a desktop and at Office Live's servers, including Outlook contacts and events. It works with Windows XP SP2, 2003 Server, or Vista with Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2 or higher (required for users of Mac OS 10.2 and up).

With the Office Live Add-In installed, you can reach your online Workspaces within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

(Credit: CNET)

The online tools preview Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files as well as PDFs, PNGs, and JPGs. Workspace is meant to work in tandem with Word, Excel and PowerPoint XP, 2003, or 2007 running locally on a PC. You can preview, not edit, documents from a browser. Web Notes, on the other hand, do enable the creation and formatting of small text documents online.

Office Live Workspace emphasizes collaboration rather than composition. To share documents with other people, you can send them a secure URL without requiring them to sign in with a Windows Live ID. Everyone with access to the workspace can make and view each others' comments.

Those invited for editing can make changes to the work, as long as they have Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on their hard drive. Office Live Workspace handily preserves the Track Changes feature from Office apps while also keeping five histories of a file. And the Share View screen allows control of another user's PC.

Another desktop component of this service is the Office Live Add-In for Microsoft Office. This is a quick download, although you'll have to restart the system afterward. Once it's installed, a Save to Office Live option will appear under the Office button within Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, with the subsequent dialog box showing your available workspaces.

Workspaces are collections of documents. Ten templates are built to manage a classroom, sports team, travels, job search, household, and so forth. For example, a travel workspace will include an expense report spreadsheet with Word files for an itinerary, packing list, and personal data. You can store a maximum of 500 workspaces containing 500 documents each for a total of 500 MB per account and 25 MB per file.

Office users who learn about these tools are likely to come to depend upon them to stash their work online with a few, quick clicks. Workplaces that use Microsoft's staple software will probably find Workspace a fine collaboration tool that makes it easy to take work away from the office.

This is a well-designed service, but I'd still like something not only to store work, but to let me make edits without opening local applications. What if you only want to correct a misspelled byline in a 20 MB report? You'll have to open Word, since Office Live Workspace doesn't even allow light, text only edits within a browser. I'll continue to lean on Google Docs for that.

Office Live Workspace, by the way, is not to be confused with Office Live Small Business, which offers a free domain name and Web design templates.

Please see more images after the jump.

Office Live Workspace stores and lets people share Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

(Credit: CNET)

Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and their Office allies can be great applications, but not everybody needs everything they offer. How do you know where to start when shopping for alternative software? You'll save money with a different brand, but will it do the trick? Should you buy boxed software, download freebies for your hard drive, access browser-based apps, or juggle all of the above?

We've reviewed nine productivity suites--including downloads and online services--and cooked up a jumbo chart mixing up their gumbo of features and file formats. IBM's release of Lotus Symphony beta added more spice to the stew last week, while continuous updates to the online applications keep us on our toes. All nine products support traditional Microsoft Office files, although not all can read the new Office 2007 formats. And although shunned by Microsoft, the Open Document Format is gaining in popularity. See: Alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Presenters for the post-lunch session today focused on two challenges. First was how to help people simultaneously collaborate on projects. Equally important was how to keep a room full of sleepy bloggers, analysts, and venture capitalists awake and alert after a lunch of turkey sandwiches. Luckily, we've played with all four of these applications before, and so we stuck with the roast beef.

Editgrid kicked off the round of presentations. Instead of PowerPoint, they used a tabbed spreadsheet in Editgrid to present. One of the really great features of Editgrid, which we've discussed before, is the option to archive and roll-back various versions of your work--something you don't get in Excel without managing a folder of file back-ups. Also notable is an Editgrid spreadsheet containing a feature comparison between Editgrid to Google Spreadsheets. It's one the most popularly shared spreadsheets on the service.

SmartSheet is another shared spreadsheet application, but it is aimed at small teams. Smartsheet has a handy feature for tracking and easily pulling the history for each individual cell in a spreadsheet. This provides several extended possibilities beyond just entering data. You still have to hit a button to save your work, which is something we've griped about in the past.

Wrike was a good follower to SmartSheet's presentation. Wrike is similar to SmartSheet, but has the added benefit of giving users the option to push tasks to the Wrike project tool whenever they get cc'd via e-mail. See our hands-on demo here..

Xcellery is the only tool presenting today that uses Microsoft Excel. In fact, it does something that--even 11 versions later--you still can't do with the industry standard application. The one thing Xcellery doesn't do is real-time viewing of another person while he or she is typing on a cell--something we've gushed about with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Luckily, the service will alert you if the other person is working on it and will give you the option to choose which person gets the edit. Previous coverage here.

Stay tuned as the next group up handles sharing through the Web, which should be interesting to watch after Zoho's announcement yesterday of their new meeting application..

Microsoft offers a Web version of Excel. But there's an important difference from competitors like Google and Zoho: It's tied to SharePoint Server and Office 2007.

A Microsoft employee, Tod Hilton, set off a post at TechCrunch when he wrote a blog talking about his plans to start working on the Excel Services team.

Hilton wrote that a future product would compete with online spreadsheets like DabbleDB, Zoho, and Google Spreadsheets. He later removed those comparisons from his blog post.

In the course of posting and deleting, Hilton shined light on a product that few people in the media have picked up on called Excel Services.

People for years have been asking Microsoft when it will offer a host-based version of its Office applications, something that competitors are doing which could threaten Microsoft's Office business.

It turns out the Microsoft already does. But, it works with Microsoft's SharePoint portal server and Office 2007. And it appears to be designed primarily for sharing spreadsheets with a company work group.

As I said in a recent post, Webware relies on Google Spreadsheets as our groupware application for tracking which Web services we want to write about. But because it is sorely lacking in the features department, I always have my eye out for alternatives offering more Excel-ish features as well as the killer collaboration function that makes Google's Spreadsheets so useful.

Xcellery's Web control panel. Simple.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One new alternative: Xcellery, a service that turns ordinary Excel spreadsheets into shareable documents. With Xcellery, multiple people can have the same spreadsheet open at the same time. Everybody's changes get recorded and shared since the system tracks things at the spreadsheet's cell level. (If two people try to save over each other's edits to the same cell, a conflict warning pops up, and the user gets to decide whose edit to keep.)

This isn't a real-time service, like Google or EditGrid. You won't see other people's edits popping into a sheet that you are working on. But every time you hit the Save button, the document is reloaded with the most recent changes from the sheet's other users.

It's Excel, but with new tools.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To use Xcellery, you create new files on the site's Web page. The site launches Excel for you. You'll get a scary macro warning the first time you use the product, but after that, it's mostly seamless. Xcellery doesn't save some data, like charts and window layouts, but Xcellery founder Reto Laemmler told me his team is working on a version that works in real time, like Google, and that will save screen layout modifications and graphics.

Xcellery also has a Web-based spreadsheet editor if you don't want to fire up Excel to work on your files. But if you want a Web spreadsheet, you can do better. (See our write-up on EditGrid.)

Like Collanos, a collaboration tool I covered earlier today, I consider Xcellery to be a bit too new to adopt in the real world. But also like Collanos, I really like the direction that Xcellery is going. Both of these products challenge pure Web applications by offering both the collaboration tools that could only work over the Internet and the rich features and fast speeds we get from our desktop apps.

Xcellery, and more than 40 other Web products for business, will be shown at the Under the Radar: Office 2.0 conference (click here for Under the Radar's official blog) on March 23 in Mountain View, Calif. I'll be moderating presentations all day. If you'd like to come see the start-ups, and maybe grab a free Webware T-shirt, use this link for a discounted conference pass.