Thread: Glide

Sign up to Glide, and you get a generous 10GB of free storage for up to five users. If you want more, you can pay, and there's an optional free email account, Glide is not so much an office suite as an in-browser operating system with a start menu, desktop icons, a taskbar and the familiar window furniture.

Three buttons at the top of the screen switch between the Desktop, your Glide HD, which stores the files you've created or uploaded, and a portal to other websites. There's a lot here - we'll return to the main office apps, but you get mail, an address book, searches on your Glide HD and the web, sticky notes, a calculator, a photo editor, blogging, website creation, and the Cube. This last is a 'social' media player giving you access to your own uploaded music, videos and pictures as well as those shared by other users. We found our cube populated with music ranging from Duran Duran to Metallica, so be warned. Glide has an interesting spin on the context menu - instead of right clicking, you click on the 'Go' button at the top left of a file icon. This produces the 'Glide Bubble' which looks like a pie chart with various options, such as View, Edit, About, and another central Go button to drill down to further options.
Despite the desktop interface, Glide does like to spread itself around and if you click on the Writer icon, you'll open a new browser instance. Although you can upload any kind offile to Glide, Writer is fussy about what it can open - we were only able to open HTML files. We could, however export files from writer as DOC, DOCX, RTF and PDF. Writer isn't that exciting. You get 20 fonts, but no styles, spellchecking in English, French and German and links to look up selected words in the Merriam Webster online dictionary and thesaurus - again these opened in a new browser instance. You can insert pictures, but only in-line with text, unless you fiddle around with tables. There's also an air of unfinished business with a 'Themes' button that just produces a 'Coming soon' message.

Clicking on the snappily named 'Crunch' button to open the spreadsheet produces a message that you need to access it from the Glide Sync application. The latter needs to be downloaded, and once installed can be used to synchronise your online files and Glide desktop with files on your hard disk. You also get Crunch, which installs on your hard disk as a normal app. Having done that, we found that Crunch (admittedly a beta version) is again fairly basic. We couldn't find any charting functions and only 41 functions, with several categories again producing a 'Coming soon' message. There was a button for pivot tables, but due to the absence of a help file we didn't get to grips with this. When saving a spreadsheet we were only offered the .gcr format, with export limited to PDF or HTML. The lack of Excel or even CSV formats means we can't really take Crunch seriously in its present state.

Back online, Presenter won't open Powerpoint files, but will export them. First impressions were that despite a Beta tag, it was rather better equipped than its team mates. There is a reasonable selection of templates and themes, and a nifty pop¬up formatting bar for use when editing text.

Finally, we should mention the photo editor. It supported all the formats we tried, lets you crop photos, remove red-eye, and apply all sorts of enhancements- such as sharpening and equalising - and a bunch of special effects.