Some of you may remember Live Documents, an online office suite that was launched by Sabeer Bhatia (of Hotmail fame) more than a year ago. Live Documents, like Google Docs, would run completely inside the browser and the user interface was an exact clone of Office 2007.
Not sure if the legal team at Microsoft has a role to play here but InstaColl, the company that is developing Live Documents, has completely shed the Office 2007 skin and launched their first product called Live Presentations.
Live Presentations is a web based presentation creator with all the standard features but they also provide an Adobe AIR app to help you create presentations on the desktop even while you are not connected to the Internet.
The free version of Live Presentations allows you to create 20 presentations (or 100 MB of storage space whichever is lower) or businesses could opt for the $6.99 per month plan that comes with 1 GB of storage space.
Web applications that offer offline support are always appreciated by users and Live Presentations is probably the only service that provides a proper offline editor for slideshows. Other than standard PowerPoint features, Live Presentation editor also lets you insert pictures from Flickr, translate text and more.
However the service has far too many bugs* and the pricing model may make it slightly hard for Live Documents to pull users who are already in love with other online presentations apps like Zoho Show, SlideRocket, 280 Slides or Google Presentations.
*Sumanth Raghavendra of InstaColl writes – "we are still in a soft launch mode and have not yet formally launched our application which is why we still have the bugs that you might have come across. We will be doing the formal launch next week."
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/office/live-documents-releases-offline-presentation-editor/6427/
Tags: Archives, exclusive, live documents, offline, powerpoint, Office Online
Reader Comments
Can the offline editor create distributable standalone presentations or do they need to be published online to their storage?
Written by anonymous on 01.09.09
Is Live-documents.com team still alive? They launched it in 2006 and then in November 2007 and again after two years they are back? They must be joking. I heard that they had packed up and gone home. Why only just Presentation so far and with so many bugs? Where are other Office products? The irony is that they can’t get rid of hyphen in their domain name (worth a couple of hundred dollars at Sedo), let alone other Office products. You need a proper business plan in place before you make big announcements. The IT world is ever-evolving and those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Written by asif on 02.13.09
I don’t know what problem this so called Live Documents solve? BTW, shouldn’t the title be live-presentations?
I’d rather prefer to create presentations on a pirated version of MS Office!
Written by mohd on 03.22.09