If you’re waiting to get your hands on office online, you’re going to have to just keep on waiting. Turns out that less than 1,000 Microsoft employees are currently using office online as part of a test that’s slated to go through till February, at least.  Consumers will get the opportunity to check the Office online out sometime in 2009, when however, remains to be seen.
Not much has been said about when Office Online will be ready, or, for that matter, even when consumers will actually be able to start playing with it. Ideally,  consumers will get a peek at …read more

Collaborative editing isn’t something that need to do very often, but when I do, the first thing that I’m going to be installing is the absolutely brilliant Textflow,  which just launched in public beta yesterday. TextFlow is an Adobe AIR application that lets one ‘master editor’ to merge documents from up to seven other editors.
Using TextFlow, editors send their changes to the master editor, who then can simply drag and drop all of the different versions of a document to TextFlow, which will then look at all the documents in the service, finding all of the edits, and then will …read more

One of my all time favourite applications as a blogger is Windows Live Writer. While it’s not exactly an office suite product, it’s certainly one of my must have products. And now, something that I’ve only just learned about – Live Mesh – will take the drafts that I store on one system, and make them accessible wherever I am! This all of a sudden made my blogging life a lot easier.
I’ve used Windows Live Writer for my offline blog reading, and then Google Gears for offline Google Reader posts, and now, I can throw my drafts up on Mesh …read more

Microsoft has confirmed that they will be releasing web based versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint that will run on any browser, including Firefox and Safari. This new service will allow for creating, editing, collaborating, and sharing documents using the web.
Microsoft won’t say when the new version of Office, known as Office 14, will arrive, but Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said that a technology preview of the browser-based products will come later this year and that a beta version will be released in 2009.
There’s a full Q&A with Microsoft Blogger, Sarah Perez here, including a discussion about whether …read more

The OpenOffice.org 3.0 Release Candidate 1 is now out and ready for testing but the developers do not recommend it yet for production use. If you want to try OpenOffice.org, you can download and install their stable versions.

This free and open productivity suite release candidate 1 can be downloaded for  Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac.
Oh, by the way, be sure to checkout the system requirements before you install OpenOffice.org 3.0 Release Candidate 1.
[ via OpenOffice.org Snapshot Builds and Release Candidates ]

If you’re a fan of Google web applications, then this might be a help for you. GMDesk is a tool that allows you manage all you Google apps like you have a stand-alone application for all. You do not need to open all those application separately but have it with GMDesk run for you in just one environment.
Fire up GMDesk, and just alt-tab (on Windows or Linux) or Cmd-tab (on Mac) to shift between this application and the other ones you are running.

GMDesk offers an easy menu as well as keyboard shortcuts to switch between different Google services, and you …read more

I am enrolled to a Mandarin class this semester at school and learning Mandarin Chinese is really difficult, especially when you don’t have any background about the language. Like me, I really find it hard at the first few meetings. The instructor told us that we will begin the lesson learning the basic pronunciation and later learn some Kanji.
As we go along, I may say that I am still a beginner with the new language and has to learn more. Well, I then visit some Chinese websites to have a more hand-on with the language. Applying and practicing what you …read more

Another productivity tool for everyone, now it’s a quick and multi-purpose launcher called Executor. Yup! Obviously to execute things out. Haha.. It is basically a more advanced version of Windows Run.
Developed by Martin Bresson, Executor gives you easy way to manage shortcuts of runnable applications or tools in your Windows system. It has many features which includes:

Keywords have properties like shortcuts, and you can for example drag-drop a shortcut/file/folder/favorite to add it as a keyword.
Auto-completion for keywords, file system and history (can also be configured).
Url detection, Enter URLs directly (like www.google.com, mail.google.com, google.com or http://www.google.com).
Keywords support parameters. Example “google latest …read more

Checking the latest at the Adobe Labs, I saw this income generating tool from Adobe PDF. Ads for Adobe PDF, which is powered by Yahoo!, allows to generate income with your published PDF documents. It is currently in its beta version and is only limited to some qualified publisher.
Ads for Adobe PDF is a new opt-in service that enables publishers to monetize their PDF content through advertising. The advertising service, powered by Yahoo!, automatically matches and displays dynamic, contextual ads in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat when a user views the PDF. Publishers that sign up to participate in this …read more

If you’re using Craiglist.org to do some job hunting, looking for an apartment, or selling some used things… try this CraigsList Reader.
A tool to search craigslist based on multiple locations and categories. Enter your search term and choose your options to narrow down your search result. Set notifications to alert you, or send you an email when new posts meeting your criteria appear on craigslist. Fast searches are performed by using concurrent connections. Sort items by date, location, category, title or price. Save, and load search results to analyze or store. Version 3.2 has added few features, and fixed few …read more