Ten Minutes With Peepel April 6, 2007

What is it Peepel is an online office suite comprising a word processor, calculator and spreadsheet, operating within its own desktop environment inside the browser.

Executive Summary: Early days, but a promising idea. Needs design tweaks, offline capability (in the works) and collaboration features to compete.

My ten minutes: A webpage starts you off, accessible in Office 2007 style with a drop down menu from the top left corner giving you access to the programs. The word processor, or WebWriter, and the spreadsheet, or WebSheet, are also pretty straightforward, opening in their own windows within the desktop. Office 207–like bars or ribbons appear at the top of the window giving access to the usual functions — a nice touch, although they take up too much space unless you’re lucky enough to have a huge screen at your disposal (typical problem where software is designed by dudes with massive displays.)

Everything is pretty intuitive and familiar, especially to anyone who has played around with Office 2007. A nice extra is a column of icons on the left side of the screen allowing you to move easily through the documents and programs you have open within the Peepel desktop. Once again, though, this reduces the amount of space you have left to actually do stuff.

I couldn’t find any way to import spreadsheets or documents (dragging and dropping, however, works well with documents) but exporting stuff is straightforward enough. A workspace manager allows you to save all the open windows and files in a particular way, another nice touch. The icons, though intuitive, all felt a bit uninspiring and well, childish. Maybe that’s intentional. I couldn’t find any way to collaborate on documents.

Verdict: This would be good for taking short notes or building small spreadsheets you want to work on when you’re on the move, or if you can’t affort an office suite. Not ready for more than that right now.

Score: 6 out of 10