Thread: Peepel

Peepel, from Australia, takes a more original approach to the online desktop. A large logo top left acts as a start button, and active tasks are shown as buttons on the left. As you mouse over these the buttons expand and the corresponding window comes to the fore for viewing - clicking on the button makes that window active. There's also a jump-out pane for notifications and messages from other Peepel users. At the time of writing no overall storage lin1it had been set, though there's an upload limit of 256KB on individual files or 2.3MB for zipped files. Microsoft Office 97-2003 and Open Office documents and spreadsheets can be imported. By default the file manager has sub-folders for imported and shared files, but you can create new folders.

The large banner at the top of the screen with the SJK advertisement at first seems a waste of space. However, when you open a document or a spreadsheet this changes into a tabbed ribbon rather like that in Microsoft Office 2007. The contents of this change to suit the active window, and you can have more than one spreadsheet or document open at once.

Despite the ribbon, the word processor is fairly simple. English seems to be the only spelling language and there are just seven fonts. The table feature is good, with handles to change the size of rows and columns. There are dedicated tools for inserting hyperlinks, email addresses and images, though it only seems possible to place these 'in line' so you can't wrap text around them, but you can drag them in from other web pages.

The spreadsheet is also simple, with no charting, and tabs to switch between text formatting, number formatting, functions and templates - though at the time of writing the last only included a very simple budgeting sheet. The 165 built-in formulae are grouped by type: logical, text, date, statistical and so on, with a dedicated autosum button. Given its Australian pedigree it's perhaps unsurprising that in currency formatting you have Australian dollars, British pounds, euro, yen and Chinese yuan.

To share a spreadsheet or document with other Peepel users, you turn to the sharing tab on the ribbon and add their email address. You can either give them read-only or write privileges. When you're editing a shared document, a dot on the title bar turns red when you don't have control and green when you do. Although we couldn't find a way to download files from the file manager, it turned out that the word processor and spreadsheet ribbons have buttons for this again, you can export in Microsoft Office 97-2003 and Open Office formats.

There's no presentation software, but there is a calculator, should your operating system inexplicably lack one and, strange as it may seem, a web browser to use inside your Peepel desktop. Help is excellent, with online 'Quick Help' and a more detailed 51-page PDF available for download.

There are some clever touches, such as the 'half maximise' button that neatly sizes a window to the left or right of the browser. The Workspace Manager is also a smart feature - you can save all your open windows and applications for re-use in another session, so you can return to your desktop exactly as you left it. Should you wish, you can save multiple desktops for different sets of tasks. If you want to keep up to date with changes to shared files and messages from other users without logging in to Peepel, then you can subscribe to a RSS feed.