How to Open Email Attachments
Tuesday, June 20th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
A lunch break with Assaf and the rest of my team brought some interesting discussions on email attachments and Office 2.0 today. Currently, the only way to open a Microsoft Word document using an online word processor such as Writely or Zoho Writer is to save it on the local file system, then upload it to the online application. A one-step approach would dramatically improve the overall end-user experience.
There are two ways I could see this working. The one suggested by Assaf is to implement a simple browser extension, using Mozilla’s Greasemonkey for example. Problem is, it breaks one of the most important rules for Office 2.0, which is not to use any browser extension.
Another approach would consist in supporting user-defined piping directly within web-based email clients such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. This would require support from Google or Yahoo!, but it certainly would be the most robust solution. Of course, we should expect Gmail to provide such capabilities for Writely, but supporting competitive offerings such as Zoho Writer would certainly not hurt Google’s karma.
In the meantime, I have added a new entry into the Office 2.0 bug tracker.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Funny that you bring this up — I got caught in the same dilemma after finding presentations in both ODP and PPT formats.
I, too, avoid installing Office at all costs, and resorted to downloading and sending myself an attachment in Google Mail.
Does anyone else encounter frustration working with teams that demand you use Office (specifically .xls) and don’t quite embrace the Office 2.0 paradigm? What do you do in this situation? I ran into this wall myself yesterday!
One solution, at least for the Open Document format, was demonstrated by IBM’s Doug Heintzman at the Southern California Linux Expo in Feburary this year.
His demo showed “collaborative editing of the same document (over the network) in two different editors. Two people, one in Firefox and one in OpenOffice Writer were editing the same document in real time.”
Because Open Document is truly open, Firefox and other web browsers can be extended to read and write Open Document files while they remain in their native format, hence no need to import or export anything.
Some more info at Groklaw here.
It belongs in the browser.
A read/write browser should allow you to take content from one place and put it in another with little pain. Browsers already do that in two different ways. If the data is small, you can put it in a link. You’re moving content every time you click ‘Tag This Link’ with del.icio.us. If the data is big, you need to save as, browse, upload, and delete local copy. There must be a simpler way.
Say a friend emails me a picture. I want to remove red eyes in an online photo editor, then upload to my Flickr account. It should be a simple matter of moving the photo around without the labor of managing temporary files.
A browser extension is the best way to build the feature first, and then add it to the browser itself.
There should be an open standard for Browser extensions. One that enables services collaboration.
Ismael,
An Office 2.0 question: I am using several of the tools you recommend such as Salesforce.com, Zoho, Streamload, etc. How do you keep track of usernames and passwords? Is there a Web 2.0 or similar tool that you recommend?
PS: I just love salesforce — the more I use it the better it gets.
Thanks!
-Ryan
Enrico,
I agree with you. I will add an entry into the Office 2.0 bug tracker.
Ryan,
As this article on online identities explains, there is no good solution yet.
I currently use secret naming conventions to remember passwords.
Well, although Ryan’s question was for Ismael, I still would like to tell you that you can easily manage the username & password using a browser like firefox. Or do it the way I do it:
- I try to keep the same username
- I choose different passwords everytime.
- I keep all usernames and passwords in my Gmail account
For the later, I simply email myself with the website’s name as the subject and I include username & password in the email’s body. I find it to be the most handy way of managing usernames & passwords! And Gmail is part of Web 2.0 too anyway…
I hope my request will be granted.
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