Microsoft Office Web Apps July 2010

The latest version of Microsoft Office – Office 2010 Home and Student edition – is now available, which we’ve already tested as part of our office software review. But Microsoft has also released an online version of its Office software – Microsoft Web Apps. We haven’t fully lab-tested it, but here are our first impressions.

Microsoft Web Apps is a web-based office suite, so you don’t have to install any software and it works in your web browser – be that Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox or Google Chrome.

Windows Live, Hotmail and Office Web Apps

What you do need to have is a Microsoft Hotmail webmail account, or to create a Windows Live ID, which is simple to do and takes just a few minutes. Google Web Apps is integrated with Hotmail, similar to the way Google Docs is with Gmail, and allows you to open Office documents directly from your webmail.

A Windows Live account also gives you access to Microsoft’s online storage facility, Skydrive, which gives up to 25GB of free storage space, vastly more than its rival, Google, which only allows up to 8GB. Skydrive lets you upload and share not only Office documents, but any file type accessible from any device with a web connection.

Office Web Apps includes cut-down versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and allows users to create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notes.

Storing Office files in Skydrive

Files are all stored in your Skydrive, in a folder called ‘My Documents’ mimicking the folder you’d see on your own computer. Either individual files or whole folders can be shared with friends or colleagues using simple ‘Share’ buttons available in both individual apps and the file folder view.

As with other free online Office suites, the range of editing functions is limited compared to their offline paid rivals, but Word and Excel have enough features such as tables, pictures, links and formatting. PowerPoint, however, is particularly restrictive in its range of designs for creating presentations, compared with the version that’s in Office 2010.

Excel problems

We encountered some problems uploading files in Excel. Some files we tried to upload couldn’t be opened in the Excel Web App, and Microsoft has a list of spreadsheet features that don’t work online, which you can view here.

There were also inconsistencies in the menus and toolbars across the different apps, and differences in the way that PowerPoint and Word, say, approach autosaving your files while you’re working on them. Hopefully, Microsoft will iron out these usability issues in a future upgrade to Office Web Apps, as many of them are likely to put off potential users.

In addition, we’d like to see new functions, such as the ability to drag and drop files within the Skydrive folder structure, upload files directly into Office web apps and embed links to files in web pages.

In Word, rather confusingly, there are two screen views of your document – one for editing, and one for viewing, where the document’s formatting more closely resembles how your document will print. In our test documents, created in Word 2002, the formatting of tables, footnotes and images were preserved pretty well when we opened them in the Word web app.

Linking Web Apps to Office 2010

Microsoft describes Office Web Apps as an ‘online companion to Office 2010’, and this is where the most benefit will be derived from the online apps. The on-screen layout of the apps will be familiar to users of the desktop version of Office and transferring and opening files between the two systems is well implemented.

In terms of how Office Web Apps compares with its principal rival – Google Docs – there are some notable missing features. The app version of Excel, for example doesn’t let you add charts or graphs online, but Google Docs has gadgets and charts that you can incorporate into your spreadsheet.

Overall, there’s plenty of scope for Microsoft to improve Office Web Apps. It’s easy to create basic documents, but the more-advanced features are only available in documents created on the conventional desktop version of the Office suite. And, although it’s a great first step from Microsoft and is a useful addition to the Office package, enabling users to have remote access to their documents across the web, it can be sluggish and troublesome to use.

If you'd like to try Office Web Apps you can get started on the Office Live website.

Pros: Free, good for sharing and collaborating on documents

Cons: Can be slow, limited features – unless you install Office 2010, usability issues