Acrobat.com Rounds Out Its Office Suite with Tables

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post called "Adobe Throws Down the Collaboration Gauntlet," in which I talked about what I assumed to be Adobe's different approach to online Office-style application suites. Just recently, Adobe added both Presentations and, now, Tables to their online offerings. This gives them an online word processor, and online presentation editor/player, and an online spreadsheet tool.

The differentiator, in some ways, is the heavy emphasis on collaboration. While Google Docs offers collaboration to varying degrees in their online suite (more so in their spreadsheet app than in others), and we've yet to see how far Microsoft will go with their upcoming, online version of Office, Adobe has made it pretty clear that collaboration, rich media, and a really good user experience are the cornerstones of their online office suite. In some ways, I look at Tables and think "You know, if Apple made an online version of Numbers, this is kind of what it would look and feel like." just because it looks and feels so good.

There are a couple of niceties that aren't found in Google Docs, though. The "Private View" is really nice because if you want to sort or filter data while others are working with you, you can do so without changing their view. Tables is a pretty serious demonstration of Adobe's LiveCycle Data Services (which is supposed to get a pretty nifty update today), as I'm assuming that it's LCDS that's used on the back end to handle all the data synchronization between collaborators in Tables (and probably in Presentations and Buzzword too). On the other hand, Google Docs has some pretty nice data import features (ie; being able to say =http://some.data.service.site/ in a table cell, as seen here), which Tables doesn't.

Now I'm not much of an Excel guy, so I can't say just how much coverage Tables has on formulas compared to Excel, and there's no pivot tables (I'd imagine that's going to be added sooner rather than later), but as with most things software, only 20% of the possible features in an application are used by 80% of the people. I've posited that Adobe's audience is the small office, or the small workgroup, where a handful of people need a simple way to communicate and collaborate in real time on various types of Office-style documents. Tables goes after that audience with Adobe's usual style.