Office 2010 Web Apps

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Familiarity may or may not breed contempt but it does take the edge off admiration. And yes, it also breeds children! When the likes of Google Docs and Zoho were born and strutted the prowess of their very able online word processor and spreadsheet applications, some of us not only applauded but also began to scamper off in that direction. The newbies were free, offered collaborative working, and they got the job done. Period. Never mind, if page formatting went for a toss. Or, you had compatibility issues, very limited functionality, or took time to re-learn… Many people appreciated the new simplicity. Yet, many
didn’t...
You couldn’t expect Microsoft to sit pretty and watch upstarts impinge on its home turf. So, turning adversity into opportunity, the world’s biggest software company has just fired its first salvo of online productivity applications in the cloud. Called Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps (www.office2010 [3]. microsoft.com), this gives you free online versions of the very familiar Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote application. These web programmes allow you to create, view, edit or share your Office documents from virtually anywhere — whether you have Office on the computer that you are using at the time or not. All you need is a Windows Live account, a supported browser and of course an Internet connection. For storage, you automatically get to use Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft’s 25GB free online storage space.
But hey, now don’t get greedy and expect all the plush, rich functionality that you see in the full-blown desktop versions of these programmes. The web versions offer sufficient features to satisfy the majority of us.
Issues like conflict resolution, when two or more users are working on a document together have also been dealt with. Therefore, installing Silverlight (Microsoft’s web application framework that provides a rich media experience on the Web) enhances the user experience and improves image rendering, but is not a necessity to run Office 2010 Web Apps.
Apart from several nifty new features, what is really nice is the fact that Microsoft Office 2010 works very smoothly in tandem with SkyDrive, allowing you to save documents directly to this personal virtual drive in the cloud. (If you want to take it for a spin, go to http://is.gd/cucbJ [4].) In fact, if you want to save a file on SkyDrive, you don’t even have to save your file on to your PC first; you can save it directly to the SkyDrive.
That’s not all. The giant from Redmond is also working hard and ambitiously to make your SkyDrive resident Office documents accessible (and editable) to your cell phone. While this works perfectly over WiFi and over 3G, what happens over an ordinary EDGE/GPRS connection can be anybody’s guess.
Overall, good going Microsoft… Your move, Google!
The writer is a part-time publishing consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. He can be contacted at ashishone@gmail.com [5] and
twitter.com/ ashishone