Microsoft Office on the web

DESIGNED FOR DOCUMENT ACCESS on the move Microsoft Office 2010's Office Web Apps has limited and disappointing functionality.

While Office 2010 is available to download for the Vole's Software Assurance licensing customers its Office Web Apps (OWA) is not available until 12 May. OWA consists of versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote that can be accessed via a browser, but are being spun by Microsoft as complementary to the full Office 2010 rather than replacing it.

So far only a technical preview of OWA has been widely seen and this did not allow anything other than viewing in Word, while Onenote was absent entirely. We have now been allowed a brief hands-on with the final versions, courtesy of Microsoft.

In the Vole's vision, its Office Web Apps will be used to quickly view documents while searching for the required one on a Sharepoint portal or provide an emergency fallback if the full-blown Office suite is not available, such as when a worker is at an airport web terminal, for example.

For this reason, the Office Web Apps have limited functionality compared with the full client versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote.

For example, the Word Web App doesn't let you edit or insert tables - these simply show as placeholders if you open a document containing some.

The Excel Web App also doesn't let you create charts, but if you change any of the cell values, existing charts will reflect the update.

Of course these restrictions also mean that users of Microsoft's Office Web Apps aren't going to be able to get away with using just the cloud-based version by itself, but they definitely will be forced to buy the desktop version of Microsoft Office if they want to actually, you know, create any documents. Office is the Vole's major cash cow, even more than Windows, so it's not about to offer users in its captive customer base any services that enable them to avoid buying it.

However, Microsoft said that for the most part, documents will display in the Web Apps exactly as they would look in Office 2010, and this seemed to be the case with the test documents I used here.

Powerpoint files, for example, seemed to display in the browser exactly as you would expect them to in the full Powerpoint client.

Microsoft also claimed that documents can be 'round tripped' between users editing using Office 2010 and the Web Apps, without losing any formatting.

Collaborative editing is also supported in some applications; Spreadsheets can be opened by more than one person using the Excel Web App, while OneNote documents can be edited by several users using the browser or rich client.

The applications have been designed to closely resemble their desktop counterparts so they will be familiar to users, and they consequently look much slicker than other web-based applications such as Google Docs.

However, Google's apps mostly have greater functionality than their Microsoft counterparts, which largely have just basic editing and formatting functions. While the Vole says its Web Apps only support Microsoft's Office Open XML file formats (but they don't really support its ISO OOXML specification), you can view files created using Office 2003 or earlier, and - as has been the Vole's wont with its Office extortion-ware for many years now - attempting to open one will ask you if you want to convert it to the newer format.

The good news is that the apps are cross-platform and have been designed to work in other browsers such as Firefox or even Apple's Safari, according to Microsoft.

Once available Microsoft provides access to the OWA for business customers via Sharepoint and the rights to use them come only with the volume licensed editions of the Office 2010 Office Standard and Office Professional Plus.

However, customers can choose to deploy OWA using the free Sharepoint Foundation - formerly Windows Sharepoint Services - on a Windows server, or the full Sharepoint Server 2010, or even via the Sharepoint Online hosted service.

Consumers will be able to access the applications from June via Windows Live, assuming they have a Windows Live ID.

Overall OWA does seem to be best regarded as an extension of Office 2010 rather than a replacement for it. Consumers seeking basic tools to create and view documents may be satisfied with these capabilities once the Web Apps become available in Windows Live. But business users should expect to still have to purchase the Vole's full Office suite, so they probably won't save any money. µ