“Quip released a desktop version of its word processing and spreadsheet software Wednesday, giving Mac and Windows users the ability to modify files on the service without having to open their Web browser,” Blair Hanley Frank reports for IDG News Service.
“Branching out to a native desktop app beyond Quip’s existing offerings on the Web, iOS and Android provides a number of benefits for users, most notably support for editing files offline.,” Frank reports. “Users who need to collaborate on shared documents with other people will be able to see where their colleagues are editing in real time and send messages back and forth within the app, just like they can on the Web or through Quip’s mobile apps.”
“Quip’s new app is another swing at Microsoft Office’s dominance of the productivity suite market,” Frank reports. “In a post to Medium discussing his company’s development efforts, [founder and former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor] claimed the app can open documents faster than both Word for the Mac and Google Docs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft. Death by a thousand cuts.
Death by a thousand paperless cuts
Death by a thousand (paper)Clippy cuts.
Office is best in class. Everything else is a minor league contender.
Depends on what we are doing.
Unfortunately I have to agree when it comes to Excel. It is way more powerful than anything else I’ve ever seen. But then for most purposes, that power is not required.
But I wonder, did Excel, by kind of doing what really should have been done in a database, kill off easy to use databases? It seems to me that databases were never really made accessible to normal users. If people had no choice but to use one, they’d have been made more accessible and mainstream. We’re left with people trying to wield the mighty but dangerous Excel on their data, where one careless sort could scramble the whole thing and multi user is out of the question. I think Excel has no right to so recklessly offer the power it does, given how vulnerable the data is. Could we have had full database power behind a friendlier, spreadsheet like interface?
That is why I use Filemaker Pro in conjunction with Excel.
Back in the day I was an MS Access user. I liked it and we developed some really cool databases with great ways to search and sort in forms. But we found early on the it didn’t scale up well. Really unfortunate.
Excel, yes, best in class hands down. PowerPoint, eh… debatable, Keynote has some very nice attributes. Word, you’ve got to be kidding right??! It’s an F-ing disaster.
Agreed about Excel and Keynote (which I prefer to PowerPoint), but not about Word. Word is bloated to be sure, but in a business or scientific environment where there’s a need to produce complex documents, particularly tables, it’s miles ahead of other offerings, including Pages. I no longer need to produce complex tables, so I use either Pages and even the simple freebie “Bean”.
Actually, I work in a complex technical environment and Word is singularly unsuited to the creation and maintenance of large documents. We generate operational and maintenance manuals with thousands of pages that require routine updates that are coordinated across many documents. Word has no capability to handle anything at this scale.
On top of that, I’d like to shoot the team responsible for the Styles management. Idiocy on so many levels!
“Users who need to collaborate on shared documents with other people will be able to see where their colleagues are editing in real time and send messages back and forth within the app, just like they can on the Web or through Quip’s mobile apps.”
AM I the only one that sees a “potential” for a huge amount of back door intrusions, in the manner of “flash player”?
I’m not saying this is Quip isn’t good but opening up to interactive real time work needs detailed and planned security behind it.
you are right, occasionalposter1.
furthermore, online realtime collaboration never seems to live up to its potential. messaging interrupts the authoring and collaboration devolves into chatting.
if you want to collaborate, get in the same room. sending messages back and forth is a waste of time.
a gated process is so much better: people talk, direction is decided, author does his thing, then editor does his, then publication. Thomas Jefferson demonstrated very good results in this manner, did he not?
All the technology we have hasn’t changed our need as humans to take the time to write clearly without constant interruption.