Microsoft Office

I was working on a long spreadsheet the other day. It was destined to become a PDF with nice formatting which would live on the web. I set it up to be formatted as a table, repeated the top row on each page, and set margins. All smooth sailing until I tried to add a disclaimer at the bottom of each page.

Apparently footers in Excel don’t depend on the amount of space they take up. I kind of expected that you could have as much text as you want as long as it fit within the footer space. My plan was to pop the text in there and drop the font size to 8 or 9. Unfortunately Excel has a 255 character (including spaces and formatting characters!) limit for headers and footers. Why? I don’t know.

There is a way to work around this limit. I pasted the text into Word, changed the page orientation to landscape, hit enter 5 or 6 times, then hit Alt-PrintScreen. This captured an image of the document to my computer’s clipboard. I hit enter a few times so my screen capture wouldn’t have the Word insertion point cursor right next to the text. I pasted the screen shot into an image editor and cropped out the excess. In the Excel footer dialog, I inserted my image, which was paradoxically bigger than the text I wanted to display.

Works fine, but kind of annoying!

I was working in Google Docs yesterday and thinking that I could be more efficient by creating documents in Word. However, Word doesn’t allow me to share my documents with coworkers. Perhaps Microsoft’s online Office Live workspace would bridge that gap.

I signed up and was pleasantly surprised that the site allowed me to use Firefox. After two confirmation e-mails I uploaded a Word doc and tried to edit it. Office Live prompted me to download and install a program to my hard drive. However even with this program it is not possible to edit documents directly using the web interface. The system “checks out” the file and opens it using your own copy of Office. This is true in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Sharing the document was easy enough. I’m not sure how many hoops my invited viewers will have to jump through to access the document, as they are not regular Office Live users. There is a checkbox that will allow viewers to see the document without logging in, so I hope that will streamline the sharing process.

So far the lack of direct online editing and the cumbersome signup process are major hindrances to this service. I’ll try it a bit more to see if there are any features that outstrip Google Docs in the online collaboration arena.