Day 28 – Office 365 File Fidelity: Does it look good?

10/22/2014

30 Days with Office 365 for Educators - Day 28

One of the big advantages Office 365 has over other cloud services is the familiar look and feel of the Office Suite of programs that many have used over the years. Those that are familiar with using Office will have little problem adjusting to the new cloud-based Office 365 Suite of apps. Another advantage is the ability of Office 365 documents to maintain file fidelity across a variety of uses.

File fidelity is a term that is used to describe how well a document looks when used in different types of situations. Having the ability to preserve formatting and maintain a consistent look and feel when switching between an online app and a local application is an important requirement for most. Office 365 offers a rich viewing experience and maintains a consistent look and feel whether editing documents online or offline.

The image below is a side-by-side screen capture of an older TechTalk4Teachers podcast transcript created using Word 2013. On the left-side the document is opened in Word Online and on the right-side is the document opened in the full Word 2013 application. Can you tell the difference?

Click on the image to enlarge, press BACK to return to this page.

You can see how similar the online version looks compared to the “real” Word 2013 document. You can see the fonts, borders, and spacing are identical, the document maintains its fidelity across both editing environments.

Over the past month I have used the four main online apps of Word Online, Excel Online, PowerPoint Online, and OneNote Online daily. As mentioned yesterday, I also routinely escalate my editing session to use the “real” applications of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are installed locally on my computer when I need that extra burst of power and speed.

For many, the simple Office 365 online apps will suffice, but it is nice to be able to have a choice to escalate an editing session if needed.

With the prevalence of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in many organizations the ability to view and edit documents on a device of your choice is also important. Of course this complicates things tremendously but Office 365 in general does a good job of maintaining file fidelity across devices. No cloud-based solution is perfect but the browser-based Office 365 online apps do provide a fairly consistent experience across platforms. 

There are also specific Office 365 apps for iOS and Android devices that work well with their respective operating systems.

To the cloud!

Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

Twitter: @tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc