Take a Tour of Microsoft Web Apps
Did you know that Microsoft has rolled out an online version of the Office suite? Eventually, that means you'll be able to create, edit, collaborate on, and share Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on the Web without needing a local copy of Office installed. Right now, though, the apps are still in beta. Want to see what you can really do today? Try it out for yourself today or come along with me on a short tour.
First stop: Launching Web Apps from SkyDrive
The Front Door
There's no Web site specifically for the Office Web Apps. Instead, you get there from SkyDrive -- as I explained the other day, you automatically get invited by uploading a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document to your cloudy My Documents folder.
Create a Document
After you choose to make a new document from the My Documents New menu, give it a name and click Create.
Excel Looks Familiar
Then you enter the app itself. Excel looks familiar, but it's still beta and there's not a lot you can do here. You need to enter formulas from memory -- Excel provides no help whatsoever -- and the formatting options are slight. You can pop out to your desktop version of Excel (if you have it) at any time, though, with one click. Bottom line: You can preview spreadsheets just fine, but you can't get much original work done here quite yet.
PowerPoint Is Better Equipped
Like Excel, PowerPoint has a ribbon and looks familiar, but it appears further along in its development process. You'll find a full-featured New Slide selector, as well as the ability to add images and SmartArt. Of course, you can run your deck from here as well. If your presentation needs are modest, you could actually use the PowerPoint Web App today.
Robust Save and Share
You have a lot of options for saving your document -- you can keep a copy on SkyDrive or download it to your PC. You can also share and collaborate with other people.
(Oh, and PowerPoint's menu looks a little different because changes are saved continuously -- so there's no save command.)
Coming Soon
Finally, there's not much to see in OneNote or Word; the editing tools are not implemented yet. So you can view Word docs in high fidelity, but otherwise, you'll need to wait.
Dave Johnson was employed by Microsoft Corporation at the time this article was written.
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