Microsoft's pushes Office online

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Microsoft recently announced its Office Web Apps, a collection of browser-based applications that provide some, if not all, of the features of its popular Office suite. The web-based applications are available at this point to US- and UK-based users and require that the user has a Windows Live account.

Microsoft’s web-based Office strategy has hardly been a secret but it has been a long time in the coming. Competing online applications such as GoogleDocs and Zoho Office have been available for close on four years now (GoogleDocs launched in October 2006) and in that time have been gaining ground. More importantly they have also been refining their feature sets and adding capabilities.

Clearly the growth of web-based office applications is a threat to Microsoft’s primary source of income, Office, and yet the company has been surprisingly slow to offer an alternative to using GoogleDocs. And now that Office Web Apps is here it seems as if Microsoft is still not all that keen on being a competitor to GoogleDocs.

Although the online applications are free to use and run on most contemporary browsers, they are much more focused on being extensions to their desktop counterparts than standalone applications. Microsoft is not so much looking to create new-generation online tools as much as it is looking to shore up potential erosion of its desktop Office base.

The Office Web Apps applications as they currently stand are better used to edit documents while on the move than actually creating new documents. The limited formatting capabilities and limited feature set make them basic document producers at best. Tied together with the paid-for full-featured desktop versions of the applications, however, they offer a range of new possibilities. Documents can be stored online and edited on the fly when at home or on the road.

As standalone applications, however, Office Web Apps lacks many of the features that users would want. Rather than going out to buy a full Microsoft Office suite, users might well opt for GoogleDocs or Zoho Office over Office Web Apps.

The applications included in the suite are:

Word: A streamlined version of the popular desktop word processor. Word Online can be used to type documents, check spelling, add images and create tables.

Excel: Like Word, a simplified version of the desktop-based Excel spreadsheet for basic number crunching though pie charts and the like can’t be created.

PowerPoint: A simple PowerPoint editing tool that can edit basic text and add slides but not do any heavy graphics management.

OneNote: A version of the popular note-taking application. Basic text notes, links, images and so on can be stored in OneNote online.

Office Web Apps: Good competition or too little too late? << Discuss in the forum