Share Office Web Apps is very cumbersome

However, setting up sharing is much more tedious in Office 2010 Downlaod Web Apps than it is in Google Docs. In Office Web, you don't share files, you share folders. So to share a spreadsheet, you first save it to a particular folder, and then share that folder with the people who you want to let into the file. That's no big deal if you're just sharing one file, but if you want to share different files with different groups of people, it's confusing and tedious, since you have to create a different folder for each set of people you want to share with.

If you want to change the sharing specifics on one document in a folder but not others, you'll have to move the document to a different folder. This is a catastrophic design flaw. Worse, there's not even a clear "share" link. You have to find the "Shared with" entry in each folder, click on the "People I selected" link, then "Edit permissions," then enter the name of the person or people you want to share with, and then, once that person shows up in your sharing list, you have to change the default permission from "view" to "edit."

Google, for its part, lets you share files from within the files themselves, by selecting "Invite people" from the "Share" menu. It makes much more sense. You can also see all your Google docs in one big list. With Microsoft, you have to page through your folders to see your documents. Microsoft Office 2010 does have a nice browser plug-in for drag-and-drop uploading of files, however.

That's a bonus, but not enough of one to offset the awful sharing workflow.