Two drawbacks (so far) found in SkyDrive
I’ve been trying SkyDrive and have run into two stumbling blocks so far.
Here are my questions in the SkyDrive forums and replies from Microsoft which explain the issues.
(1) Local storing of files on an iOS device
Me: I’ve been hunting around for some manual or feature explanations of SkyDrive for iOS but can’t seem to find anything. I’d like to know some details such as, are the items all stored locally on my iPad and iPhone, or do I have to mark items I wish to save locally? Any tidbits like that.
Microsoft: You can read features we support from the app description in appstore. We temporarily don’t have Offline support on iOS. But we do cache files/photos locally on your phone once you’ve manually opened it. You may use that as an alternative way for offline access but it requires you to manually open each of the file you want to access.
Me: I see.
I would just like to point out that this makes dealing with large-ish files in iOS quite awkward in comparison to, say, DropBox. In DropBox you mark as “favorite” those files you wish to store locally, and it downloads them in the background.
For example, I created a family slideshow yesterday – a movie that is about 180 MB in size. In DropBox I marked it as favorite and eventually it downloaded and I was able to view it in DropBox in airplane mode. But I wasn’t able to do this in SkyDrive. In fact, I wasn’t able to watch the whole movie in SkyDrive because the streaming was poor and I could never get past the first 15 seconds of the 6 minute movie.
I hope this is improved sometime.
(2) Search doesn’t work
Me: Search doesn’t seem to work. I created a test Doc file via the web interface in a folder, and in the doc I wrote: To whom it may concern. And I had a sentence in my test document: This may concern you.
But if I try to search documents for the word “concern” it keeps coming up with no results.
Is this still buggy? Or does it take a long time to index? Are others experiencing this?
Microsoft: Hi Doug,
Please be informed that the search function in SkyDrive only supports files that are in .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, and .xlsx formats. Also, you cannot use the contents within each documents when searching. You have to search for the name of the document instead.
Thank you.
Me: Search in SkyDrive cannot search the contents of documents created in SkyDrive? 🙂
Hmm…
OK. Thanks.
doug
It is like Abbott and Costello
Who’s on first?doug