Experience of the Microsoft Office Web Apps – Strong Catalyst on Cloud Office

Microsoft has launched Office Web Apps Technical Preview on Sep 17, 2009, which contains four free components (Word Web App, PowerPoint Web App, Excel Web App, OneNote Web App). In this preview of online version of Microsoft office, view and share of Word documents, view, editing and creation of Excel spreadsheets, view & editing of PowerPoint presentations are allowed; however, OneNote Web App will be available at a later date.

If you don’t have an invitation to test OWA, please get access to Web-based Microsoft Office Apps with a Special Way.

Word Web App
You need to upload a word document to the Skydive firstly. There are only basic view functions in Word Web App.

From the File menu, you can print the online document. After you select Print, Word Web App will try to connect to your default printer to prepare the printing (The Print feature is only available in Word Web App).

Word Web App File Menu

Beside, you can search text in the document through the convenient Find feature. The document parts which matched with your items will be listed in the sidebar, and keywords will be highlighted in the body at the same time.

There is also a simple zoom tool to set different zoom level.

PowerPoint Web App
You can directly upload or create a PowerPoint presentation. In the slide show mode, you could click Start Slide Show to view slide show and PowerPoint Web App will open a new Window to show the presentation.

PowerPoint Web App also provides an Outline View to view the presentation as a text-only outline, just select File -> Outline View.

The editing features of PowerPoint Web App are relatively rich. It supports create, duplicate, hide slide, insert picture, SmartArt or link (however, picture or SmartArt could only be added to the slide with picture or SmartArt layout). Also you can apply basic text or paragraph formatting.

PowerPoint Web App also allows you to switch between several view modes. Click View tab and here you can select Editing View, Reading View or Slide Show.

To add a new slide, click New Slide link from the Home group, there are nine slide layout available.

You can change the picture style via the similar Picture Tools, there are 28 picture styles totally.

The SmartArt Tools is also a wonderful feature. You can change layouts, text, or color scheme of your SmartArt graphics.

Be attention, in PowerPoint Web App, there is no save button because your presentation is being saved automatically.

Excel Web App
In view mode, you can find, download copy/snapshot and basic filter.

Click Edit to switch to editing mode. Excel Web App does not support editing files in this format (XLS). To convert this workbook to a supported format, open the workbook for viewing and select Save a Copy from the Office button.
You can add functions, table and link in the Excel Web App editor. Number formatting is very handily to apply. However, chart is not available in current Excel Web App.

Excel Web App is the only application in Office Web Apps that supports document collaboration. All the changes will be shown synchronously and you could check who are editing the document from the editing mode.

OneNote Web App
OneNote Web App is not currently available. But it may be a revolution in the information gathering area. I myself is very look forward to the OneNote Web App.

Conclusion
Office Web Apps are cloud document sharing & collaboration services and let multiple users access or edit office documents online. Office Web Apps is unquestionable a strong catalyst on the Cloud Office. For example, Google Docs has enabled user to share entire folders recently in order to response to Office Web Apps’ more flexible sharing policies. Interfaces are a great advantage. Office Web Apps has a long way to go; however, as the cloud computing will burst with growth, Office Web Apps get an opportunity to grow up. And finally, you’d better install Microsoft Silverlight to make documents load faster and text looks clearer.