Microsoft makes Word a serious competitor to Google Docs – Quartz

During its Build Developer Conference, Microsoft presents a project that aims to take over the collaborative writing market from Google Docs.

The software, which will be introduced in Word, Office and Outlook, and distributed to developers later this year, calls Fluid Framework and allows writing, editing and even handwritten notes simultaneously in time real. Microsoft is also trying to create the service with a built-in IA from the bottom up: a Fluid document could have hundreds of robots that analyze the content to facilitate collaboration, that is, to translate text into real-time for colleagues who speak another language, retrieve content from the Internet, or suggest grammar corrections.

Microsoft

Fluid also links information between documents; For example, if you import a table from an Excel sheet into a Word document and then update it in Excel, it also automatically updates in the Word document.

We still do not know how this implementation will work in Microsoft products, but the first demonstration shows that the company has ideas that surpass what is achievable, even in Google Docs, which was the first to use this type of Web collaboration.

Collaborative multi-person writing, however, is not completely new to Microsoft. Word has been able to manage real-time co-creation since 2015 and for the first time Microsoft has launched this feature on Office Online, now renamed in 2013.