Microsoft’s new Fluid office document is Google Docs on steroids

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Fluid is coming to Office.com and going open source:

Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents.

Microsoft calls its Lego blocks Fluid components, and they can be edited in real time by anyone in any app. The idea is that you could create things like a table without having to switch to multiple apps to get it done, and the table will persist on the web like a Lego block, free for anyone to use and edit.

“Imagine you could take those Lego pieces and put them in any place you wanted: in emails, in chats, in other apps,” explains Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The Verge. “As people work on them, they will always be updated and contain the latest information.”

Microsoft’s Fluid Framework sounds a lot like Google Docs, but it’s actually Google Docs on steroids. Microsoft is so confident it has built the future of productivity, it’s now open-sourcing its Fluid Framework so the rest of the world can help shape what it has created. Some Office.com users will even be able to start getting a taste of this Fluid future in the coming months.

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Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids

Fluid is Microsoft’s big push for entirely new documents on the web.

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The evolving Microsoft 365 development platform: Microsoft Lists and open-source Fluid Framework:

Open-source Fluid Framework and the new Lists experience are both about breaking up data into chunks that enable real-time updates and collaboration in multiple systems through the Microsoft Graph, Office and beyond.

Outlook on the web and the Office website will be the first place Microsoft's Fluid components show up, letting you use text, images, tables, charts and task lists in Outlook messages that aren't just formatted text in an email but connected chunks of data that live in a dynamic, collaborative document in SharePoint Online and the Microsoft Graph.

Initially, those chunks of data come not from Word and PowerPoint and Excel but from a new Fluid Workspace that can handle text, tables, lists, meeting agendas and action items. In time, we expect the Office apps – especially OneNote – to get updated to include Fluid components, and Fluid tasks will also integrate with To Do in the future so that @ mentions can become To Do tasks.

The Fluid Workspace will start rolling out 'soon' to Microsoft 365 Enterprise and education subscribers who sign up for Targeted Release (what used to be Office Insider).

But Microsoft is also open sourcing the Fluid Framework so that those components can work in third-party applications and websites – without any connection to SharePoint – as well as for Microsoft 365 developers who build apps and add-ons.

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