Working online is the future. Soon enough, the cloud will provide all our software, cook our dinner, and even convince our bosses and loved ones that we’re still necessary.

Unfortunately we’re still in the early stages of that dream, as technologies like HTML and Flash fight for supremacy, and traditional client-based software still sits pretty in the overwhelming majority of industries and on most of our computers. For online office suites, the fight is just beginning.

Three features in particular give the cloud an edge: the ability to access files from any internet-connected system, ease of file-sharing, and automated backing up and versioning. The apps may not be as comfortable to use as Office, nor as feature-packed, but as long as the basics are in place, most users are unlikely to complain – especially if they’re getting them for free, as is usually the case for personal use.

The catch is that what you consider an essential feature may not be what Google, Microsoft and the smaller companies prioritise. Many of these tools have been in development for years, but Office in particular has had decades to get to its current state.

It’s still relatively early days for the cloud. Still, with online technology racing forward, it won’t be long before one of the alternatives pulls ahead. It may have happened already. Let’s find out…

Online office tools on test

Google Docs
docs.google.com

Microsoft Office Web Apps
office.microsoft.com

Zoho
www.zoho.com

ThinkFree Online Office
www.thinkfree.com

Acrobat.com
www.acrobat.com

Live Documents
www.live-documents.com

Google Docs

Google Docs was the first online office suite to hit it big, and is still one of the most popular. When it first launched, it was incredibly primitive. Now it looks and feels far more like Microsoft Office, from the virtual sheet-of-paper view used by its word processor to the availability of many more fonts, including Office’s current default, Calibre.

Docs doesn’t offer anything close to Office’s power, but focuses on the basics that everyone needs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and simple vector-based drawing, along with online storage space for additional files and decent file conversion from Office’s formats.

Its simplicity can be a downside, but for the most part it’s a blessing, stripping out all the features you never use.

There are a few omissions, the biggest being offline editing. Google originally offered this via a plugin, but changed its mind and pulled it in May 2010 on the grounds that HTML5 would be able to do it better. Since then, silence. If you want to edit with Google Docs, you have to do so online and hope your connection doesn’t drop.

Similarly, while the word processing component is great for typing, its inability to do simple things like show you how much of a page you’re using without doing a print preview, customise headers or change the language in a specific document make it clear that there’s a long way to go.

Google adds features on a regular basis, but don’t hold your breath for specific improvements. Development on Docs feels slow – too slow, given the amount still to do.

Verdict: 4/5

Microsoft Office Web Apps

For Microsoft, offering a free version of Office to anyone with a Live ID account is more than a bit of a gamble, so it’s not too surprising that the Office Web Apps built into Skydrive aren’t exactly direct competitors to their offline counterparts.

Excel WebApp, for instance, lets you put together basic spreadsheets and graphs just like the regular version, but a quick glance at the toolbar compared to the full applications’ Ribbon makes it clear just how little you can do in comparison, and how few time-saving features are on offer to help you do it.

For simple spreadsheets though, it’s fine, which is more than can be said for the online version of Word. This gives you a genuinely horrible editor to work with, forcing you to type into a full-width text box. You can switch to a more traditional view for reading files and see how your document will look when printed out, but only via a read-only preview called ‘Reading Mode’. This is truly dire.

Proper margins and maximum line lengths make writing far more comfortable, to say nothing of giving you a much better idea of how much you’ve written and how many pages you’re using.

The online version of Word looks especially bad when you fire up OneNote WebApp – Office Web Apps’ diamond in the rough. Here, the simplicity works in its favour, making it easy to create an online notebook and fill it with text, images and more, from a very comfortable editing window that Word should be using.

We like OneNote a lot, and this version – while cut down – is good enough to save most people the cost of the full product.

Verdict: 2/5

Zoho

For sheer features, Zoho is the king of online office suites. With text documents, accounting, spreadsheets, presentations, mail, calendars, notebooks, wikis, discussion groups, invoicing and more, Zoho offers a jaw-dropping number of features.

Better yet, all of them are available free for personal use. They’re geared towards business use though, with the idea being that you pay for additional users and features in specific apps. The website doesn’t do a great job of explaining this up front, but at least you can try everything without having to pay first.

All the apps run from the Mail screen, whether you use it or not. You can sign in with a Google or Facebook account, or create a new one.

In terms of features, the apps easily go head-to-head with anything else out there, although the look and feel didn’t click with us as well as many others. Every app you run has its own distinct feel and style, which can be jarring, whether it’s something as simple as a different style of tab, or being kicked out of the mail interface because a different app demands the whole screen to itself.

The tools are powerful, but could do with more consistency and a good pumice stone to scrape away some of the rough edges. For these reasons more than any inherent weaknesses in Zoho’s range, we found we didn’t want to spend too much time in the suite, which is a key factor when choosing which software you’re going to be staring at all day.

You can’t argue with its power though, and if you want all of your business and editing tools in one place, this is where you’ll find them waiting for you.

Verdict: 4/5

ThinkFree Online Office

ThinkFree is a Java-based office suite, which makes it the only one in this test that has to be installed – albeit in a web browser. It’s amazing how irritating those few minutes can be when you’re dealing with a website and are used to everything simply appearing ready to go.

There are advantages, though. When it finally appears, ThinkFree does by far the best job of looking like a ‘real’ application, because that’s exactly what it is.

The document editor is a dead ringer for Word 2003, right down to the blue gradient background, and it’s amazing how impressive something as simple as being able to modify a style feels next to many other suites that simply decide that for your main header you’re going to get this font at this size in this colour and like it.

Being a Java app, it’s not the speediest – and you don’t get to use it offline just because you’ve installed it. If you want to do that, you have to buy the slightly misnamed ThinkFree Office, which costs £35. Not a huge amount compared to a copy of Microsoft Office, but still…

There is, however, a dedicated syncing tool that you can download, so that you can at least fire up another tool and continue working until your internet connection resumes, and there are mobile apps available to access and share files.

Against Office proper, ThinkFree Office loses out, but online it’s a very different battlefield. If you don’t mind using a Java app instead of pure HTML, ThinkFree is as close as you can get to replicating the offline experience in your browser, and is an excellent contender for your online office suite.

Verdict: 4/5

Acrobat.com

Unsurprisingly, Adobe’s take on the online office suite is very attractive and Flash-based. The former helps to hide the fact that it doesn’t do a vast amount compared to the others, while the latter means that it’s much slower than the competition.

But while it’s flawed, and expensive if you upgrade, it’s not without its charms. Built primarily as a collaboration tool rather than a replacement for Office, Acrobat.com offers three key features: a document-editing tool called Buzzwords, which works rather well, and a presentation maker and spreadsheet tool flagged up as ‘Labs’ and ‘Beta’ respectively.

These two are so simple it’s almost surprising that Beta can handle formulae, and they’re only available in US English. They’re barely worth mentioning, never mind using.

Buzzword, on the other hand, is surprisingly good – to a point. It offers by far the best paper-view of your documents and includes all the standard features, even if it is let down in the strangest ways.

Fonts, for instance. Buzzword gives you just seven, and none are the standards like Ariel and Times New Roman. Buzzword’s offerings include Myriad, Minion Pro and Garamond Pro.

Getting your documents out of the service is a pain, because you have to convert them to PDF format, which you can only do five times before you have to upgrade your account to Premium. This costs at least $14.99 a month. Were it free, Acrobat.com would win a few points for style and some of its PDF features, like combining multiple documents. As it is, it’s hard to recommend to anyone.

Verdict: 2/5

Live Documents

Live Documents is another Flash-based office suite, but one with rather more pizzazz than Adobe’s attempt.

Instead of the classic menu screens, it gives you a full-on virtual desktop complete with folders, Google Docs imports and an OS X style dock. It also includes alerts, a list of tasks and three editors – word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Oddly though, whichever of the icons you click, it immediately asks you what type of document you want to make anyway. Entering the document editor, the first things that jump out are the huge editing window – which includes margins and pagination, unlike many others – and the unusual range of style tools.

You can alter the kerning of the text, but not create a headline style. You can add a footnote or a comment, but there’s no apparent way to set a standard header or footer. It’s a strange editor, advanced in some ways but primitive in others, using the Flash gloss to make it look much sleeker and more powerful than it actually is.

The Spreadsheet tool fares better, partly by having a much more comprehensive view of what the user will need, and partly by presenting it in a far better way. A simple strip along the top of the screen activates all its features instead of bits popping in and out as you move the mouse cursor around the screen.

As with the other online spreadsheets, data junkies aren’t going to move from tools like Excel unless you prise them away with a crowbar, but it’s fine for the basics. Live Documents is flashy, in more ways than one.

Verdict: 3/5

The best online office suite is…

The simple truth is that right now, cloud-based office suites aren’t at the level where they can seriously challenge a good offline client like Microsoft Word or even OpenOffice.org. They can handle the basics, and for many, the basics are all that matter, but if you spend great chunks of your life in front of an editing screen, you’ll soon realise how far these suites still have to go.

For the time being, at least until internet connections become guaranteed or we start seeing better offline modes available, they’re really best used as a complement to your existing tools rather than an outright replacement – although with the increasing power of technologies like HTML5, that probably won’t be the case for much longer.

Editor’s choice – Google Docs

Even with its weaknesses and lack of offline editing, Google Docs would be our desert island office suite. Assuming the island had a reliable internet connection.

It’s one of the easiest to use, the fastest and the sleekest, and the weaknesses of the early versions have mostly been eliminated. It has a long way to go before it can compete with Office though, no matter how many people sign up.

Performance award – Zoho office

Want the office suite that does everything? Zoho is the obvious choice. It doesn’t always do things as sleekly or consistently as you might like, but you can’t complain that it doesn’t do enough.

It’s the online office that lets you do anything from write a note to run a small business. For business use, you’ll have to pay up – and finding out exactly how much can be a little confusing.