OneDrive for MS Office

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that it was possible to open and save documents from MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) directly to Google Drive.  This allows you to access those documents from anywhere simply by being logged in to your Google account.

You can also do the same thing using Microsoft's OneDrive.  If you have not used it before, OneDrive is very similar to Google Drive.  It allows you to save documents in the cloud, accessible from anywhere you have Internet access as long as you log into your Office 365 account.  You can even edit the documents using Microsoft's online version of Office if you don't have the full version of Office installed on the device you are using.  Keep in mind though that the online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint do not offer all of the advanced features available to you on your downloaded version of MS Office.

When you open or save a document in Word, you should see a OneDrive option.  If you select that, you may be asked to log into your OneDrive Account.  Your account name is your email address.  We sent you an Office 365 password in recent months, though you may have changed it.  If you don't know your password, the Help Desk can reset it for you.

Whether you use Google Drive, OneDrive, or neither is strictly up to you.  Personally, I like Google Drive better since I am already signed into that one always for may email.  If you use MS Word on an iPad, there is no way to connect from there to Google Drive, though you can access OneDrive.

Google also puts no limit on storage space, although OneDrive's 1 TB limit is pretty generous.  Both use encryption to protect your documents when uploading or downloading, and both remain password protected from the view of others unless you share a file or folder with others.

While these online storage options may be convenient if you work outside the office, keep in mind that copies of all client related documents must also be saved to the Matter Directory (M Drive) pursuant to firm policy.

Google Drive for MS Office

Hopefully everyone is becoming more familiar with MS Office.  The firm's plan to transition from Word Perfect to Word by the end of the summer remains on track.

Today, I wanted to mention a helpful add-on form MS Office from Google Drive.

Last year, the firm switched to unlimited storage on Google Drive.  This makes it an extremely convenient place to store working documents.  From Google Drive, you can access your documents from anywhere you have Internet access, without the need for VPN.  It also makes it much easier to share documents with others.

If you install the Google Drive for MS Office add-on, you can save documents created in MS Word directly to your Google Drive.  You can also open previously saved documents directly from Google Drive.  The Add-on also works with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentation. This can be a great time saver for MS Office documents you need to access from multiple locations.

If you would like to download and install Google Drive for MS Office, you can get it here:

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/driveforoffice

Once installed, it shows up as an option on your ribbon.

Keep in mind, of course, that copies of all client related documents should still be stored in the Matter Directory (i.e. MDIR or M: Drive).  If you have working documents related to clients on your Google Drive, just be sure to save a copy to the Matter Directory.

MS Office

As of today, everyone in the firm should have an Office 365 Account.  You should have received an email from Office 365 allowing you to download a setup program, which will install MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and a few other Office programs on your computer.

Hopefully by this time, it is not a surprise to anyone that we are doing away with WordPerfect and moving to MS Word as the firm's supported word processor.  I announced this change in a Blog post last August.  In March, I published this post and this one announcing the move to Office 365, which includes the most current version of MS Word (2016).

If you did not get an email allowing you to install Office 365, or lost the one we sent you, please email me or the help desk and we will send you another one.

Cain Elliot will be offering training classes beginning soon.  You should have MS Office on your computer before you take that class.  I strongly recommend playing around with the program ahead of time so that if something you do is a problem, you can ask about it during the class.

There are also online training videos available here: http://www.gcflearnfree.org/topics/office2016

I am addressing this issue again, because I want to make very clear to everyone that I will not be making an Obama-like promise that if you like your word processor you can keep your word processor.  You cannot.   The firm is moving to MS Word and you need to make sure you are up to speed on its use.

We expect to be using MS Word exclusively for all new documents by the end of this summer.  That deadline will come sooner than you think.  Please act now.

Thanks.

Office 365

The firm is planning to start a pilot group of users for Office 365.  The Pilot will likely last for about a month.  We are only looking at the component that uses MS Office, not the component that works with MS email.

For the pilot, we are looking for people who

1. are already experts in use of MS Office (at least MS Word and Excel, possibly Powerpoint)
2.  have a need to use MS Office for work when outside the office. 
3. tend to use their phones or tablets for a great deal of their work
4. are willing to experiment with the MS Office cloud platform, and
5. are willing to take the time to provide me with feedback about your experience.

Space is limited in the pilot trial, so I cannot guarantee everyone who wishes can participate.  If you don't make the pilot, you certainly can get access once we go live, assuming the pilot is successful.

If you are interested in participating in the firm's pilot project, please send me an email.  If you want to help your chances, you can feel free to explain why your input would be particularly valuable based on how you plan to use the system.

If you want to learn more about Office 365 for Business, check out Microsoft's web site.

Thanks,

Mike Troy

Editing MS Documents Online

Microsoft remains the de facto standard for editable documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Working with MS formats, however, can be problematic if you do not have MS Office.  Fortunately, there are several solutions:

Chrome Extension for Google Docs

Google will allow you to view any MS documents, such as Word or Excel.  You can also download them, but cannot allow you to edit them directly in Google Drive.  There is, however, a fix for that.  There is a Google Chrome Extension that will allow you to edit Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents in Google Drive.  If you would like to get this extension, click here.  Make sure you are doing this using your Chrome Browser. These extensions will not work if you are accessing Google Drive from Internet Explorer or some other browser.

Creating MS Documents in Drive

If you are creating a new document you can do in Google Drive using the native Google format.  When done, you can download the document to your computer.  One of the options is to download the document as a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document.   Once downloaded you can send the document to others who need that format.

Office Online

In an earlier post, I discussed how to open up a free personal account with MS Office 365.  This can also be helpful, especially if you are already comfortable operating with the MS Office interface.  Still, it involves downloading an email attachment to your computer, then uploading it again to MS Office online.  So the process takes longer than simply using Google Docs.

LibreOffice and WordPerfect

In the offline world, there are also options that don't involve having MS Office installed on your computer.  Both LibreOffice and WordPerfect are capable of reading MS Office documents and saving in that format.  However, they do not do a perfect job.  Changing document formats sometimes messes up how the document appears.  There are also instances of document corruption.  LibreOffice seems to do a much better job with MS documents than WordPerfect, but there can be problems with both.  Also, because LibreOffice is open source, you are free to download and install it on as many computers as you like without working about licensing restrictions.

Microsoft Office Online

The IT Department has been evaluating a move from WordPerfect to MS Word.  In case you missed it, you can read my log from last month on Word vs. WordPerfect.

As we continue with our evaluation, you may want to consider trying MS Office Online.  Recently, Microsoft made Office Online free for personal use.  If you have a Microsoft account, (or create a free one) you can access Office Online and use it.

MS Office online comes with online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and several other applications. It also offers a free terabyte (~1000 GB) of online storage space with OneDrive.

I tried a few features of Office Online but have not used it extensively yet.  It can perform most of the basic functions of the standard version of Office, but it definitely is a light version.  Don't expect  to have all the same features you have on your disk based version of Office.  For example, I tried to create a dual column document, as I know I cannot do that in Google Docs.  I was unable to do so using MS Office Online either. There are probably many other similar shortcomings if you are working on more complex documents.

Still, the program had the same basic look and feel of MS Office, with a limited version of the ribbon toolbar.  You also have the ability to open and edit MS Office documents and download documents you have created in MS Office format.

If you want to give this a try, I have a few warnings:

1. Only the home version of Office Online is free.  By its terms of service, you are not permitted to use it for commercial use.  Using this service for work documents would seem to violate its terms of service.
2. If you have to create a new Microsoft Online account, I strongly recommend using a personal email address rather than your work email.  We have used some of your work emails to create accounts in order to install MS Office 2013 on your computers.  Also, we may use your work emails in the future if the firm decides to purchase Office 365 in the future.  If you have a personal account using this same email address, it will only lead to complications and conflicts.
3. Microsoft seems to limit an IP address to the creation of three online accounts per day.  So if you try to create an account from work and are told you have reached the daily limit, there is nothing we can do about that.  You will have to wait for another day, or set up your account from home.
4. Do not store work documents in this online account.  If your account is closed for any reason (such as violating terms of service for commercial use) we would have no way to recover this information.
5. Keep in mind that the Help Desk does not support MS Office and has no experience with the online version, so if you have problems, you are on your own.

If the firm does eventually decide to move to an Office 365 subscription and phase out WordPerfect, we would get the full subscription which includes a traditional version of MS Office, not just the online version.  But this free version is a great opportunity for you to give it a try and decide if it is something that could be useful.

MS Office also now offers versions of its Office suite for use on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.  Just go to the App Store or Google Play and download the App to your device.

Thoughts on WordPerfect vs. MS Word

Margolis Edelstein remains a WordPerfect office.  We have debated for years whether to make the switch to MS Word.  I thought I would make today's post about my thoughts on why we continue to use WP and whether MS Word might be in our future.

How we got here

Law firms tended to be early adopters of word processors back in the 1980s.  At that time, WordPerfect dominated the market.  As a result, law firms remain the largest users of WordPerfect still today.  Yet most of the world has moved to MS Word.  Wordperfect market share is only a small fraction today.  MS began to dominate the Word Processor market in the early 1990's by successfully bundling Word with other powerful programs, such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.  It aggressively marketed its products and pushed ahead.  At this same time, WordPerfect drifted.  It took forever to get out a decent Windows version of the product.  Most WP users were still using the DOS version in the late 1990's.  The product was sold to three different companies within a few years, leaving it without a coherent long term plan.  As a result, Microsoft won the war decisively.

WordPerfect still wins in a comparison of features.

What MS Word never did, in my opinion, was develop a word processor superior to WordPerfect.  Even today, WP has many features that Word does not, including oldies like "reveal codes" to newer additions like its ability to work well with PDF documents and wipe metadata from files.  By contrast I cannot think of anything MS Word can do that WP cannot, other than read and save MS Word files better.

Reasons I don't like MS Word

There are other reasons I prefer WordPerfect to Word.  For one, Microsoft had made huge changes to the user interface over the years, requiring a great deal of retraining for employees.  This means periods of lower productivity and increased training costs.  By contrast, WP makes relatively minor changes to new versions.  Users are easily able to jump several versions ahead, and pick up rather quickly to the few minor changes that exist.  That cannot be said for MS Office.

Similarly, the format of a WP document has remained the same too.  Whether you use WP 7 or 17, accessing files created by newer or later versions works seamlessly.  That cannot be said for MS Word.  As a result, upgrades of MS Office become more difficult.  You need to upgrade the entire firm or at least an entire office all at once in order to ensure documents created by one person can be accessed by others.

Microsoft is also much more heavy handed with its licensing.  It has threatened the firm several times to required the firm perform expensive and time consuming licensing audits at our own expense, something Corel has never done.  Microsoft also puts far more restrictions on transferring licenses to other computers and other limitations on use.

Microsoft remains more expensive.  MS Office Standard costs almost $400 per seat under its volume licensing program.  Perhaps you are saying to your self "that can't be right, I paid only around $150 for Office."  That would be because you bought the Home and Student version.  It is pretty much the same thing as far as the main components are concerned, but it is a violation of the license terms to use the Home and Student version "for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities."  So even if you have a version on your home computer, you are violating your license if you do anything for work on it, or anything else related to business or a money making project.  We certainly could not use it in the office.  In truth, the firm uses the "home and business" version which costs around $200, but which also requires us to jump through a series of time consuming hoops every time we install it on a computer.  By comparison, a WP Standard license is about $180, and even less when we can buy an upgrade license instead of a full one.

So why does everyone want Word?

Despite everything I've just said about WP being better than MS Word, if I was starting a new company tomorrow and needed to buy a word processor, I would without question buy MS Word.  The bottom line is that Word dominates the market.  Because all of our clients and other businesses with which we interact use Word, it makes it much easier for us to interact if we also have Word.  Further, many third party programs, such as document management systems or special document utilities are designed to work with MS Word and nothing else.  MS Word documents, as the de facto standard are easily read on just about any platform, including Google Docs, or on your favorite phone or tablet.  You cannot get that universal use with WordPerfect.

Then why hasn't the firm switched?

The biggest factor in remaining with WordPefect is the great cost of change.  And I'm not talking about the cost of licencing 200 or so copies of MS Office.  That is only the beginning.

The firm has decades of files stored in WP format.  The cost of converting all those is likely prohibitive.  More likely we would continue to use both WP and MS Word for a time so that older files could be accessed as needed.

Most of the Staff has used WP for many years as well, they would all need to be retrained on an entirely new system, which would reduce productivity for some time and incur the cost of trainers.  Even the Help Desk staff would need extensive training in order to help others with problems.

Many of the staff have extensive libraries of macros, designed to automate many of their tasks.  There would need to be great time and expense devoted to converting these macros.  WP is even built into some of our basic systems, such as the Associate Review forms used annually.  All those would need to be rewritten as well.

Because of all these hard and soft costs, the firm has been reluctant to make such a great change.  Large conversion costs are hard to justify as an expense, and staff resources are already under stress without adding such a massive project.

Can't we just use both?

Well essentially we are using both now.  We have nearly 100 MS Office licenses distributed among the firm.  Wilmington never switched to WP when it was acquired and uses Word exclusively.  Others use it as a secondary program as needed, going back and forth.

This, however, causes its own set of problems.  sharing documents internally becomes problematic if some are using WP and others Word.  Both programs purport to open those in the other's format, but there are inevitably formatting errors that creep in, as well as an alarmingly  high rate of document corruption.  It is also a drain on help desk resources to remain experts in both programs.  At a time when we are trying to reduce demands on help desk resources, we don't want to require a doubling of their expertise.

If the firm decides to switch, there would likely be a transition period, probably lasting years, where we moved one office at a time, retaining WP on existing computers to give staff time to get up to speed on the new system.  But WP would be phased out over time so we could support only one system.

So where are we going?

I recently did a Poll of attorneys and staff asking about their preferences for WordPefect or Word.  You can click on the link below to see a summary of responses

Poll Results

If you looked at the link you will see that a substantial majority favors moving to MS Word.  For me, that is an important consideration.

If we do make the decision to move everyone to MS Word, we would probably move toward using Office 365.  This is Microsoft's new subscription based plan.  One reason it is making its disk based licensing much more onerous is that it wants to drive users toward a subscription.  I suspect Microsoft may phase out disk based licenses altogether in the next few years, or at least make them so expensive that users have no choice but to accept the subscription model.

Under Office 365's current subscription model we would pay about $100 per user per year.  This would allow you to install office not just on your work computer, but also on a home computer, tablet or phone as well.  This would greatly improve mobile productivity.

Conclusion

For now, these are just my thoughts on the matter.  Approval by the management and partnership for any such change has not been made yet.  With this post, I hope to begin a discussion on how the firm should proceed with such a change.  I value your feedback and thoughts.

Word processing is fundamental to what we do as a firm.  It is probably even more central than email for many of us.  Changing the way everyone works on such a fundamental level is not something I take lightly or that should be started with out careful consideration of all the ramifications.