Microsoft Office, the office suite for desktop applications, is one of the top applications developed and marketed by Microsoft, which is used to prepare documents, presentations, databases, and files used on desktop computers. In order to make a single document accessible to multiple users simultaneously, Microsoft developed a similar online application, called Office Web Apps.
Office Web Apps:
Office Web Apps, as you know, is the web-based or online version of Microsoft Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, and more. The primary usage of Office Web Apps is to create office documents online, and then share them with other users. Besides, more then one user can read/write access such documents/files simultaneously.
Office Web Apps Availablity:
As the name suggests, Office Web Apps for the time being is available online through limited channels, and it requires you to have a supported web browser, such as Internet Explorer v7.0 or later, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 or later, and Apple’s Safari 4. Well, currently available channels that enable users to access Office Web Apps are:
- SkyDrive Channel: SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud service that is associated with your Microsoft account (i.e. outlook.com) and is available for public usage since February 2013. SkyDrive, when got public, replaced ‘Office Live Workspace’ and all data it was storing was moved successfully to SkyDrive. Currently Office Web Apps is accessible through SkyDrive that means a user can create a document, presentation, or a similar file online and share it with his friends with a link. They can edit the file online without having or signing in to a SkyDrive account.
- Private Cloud Channel: Volume Licensing customers of Microsoft SharePoint are facilitated to host Office Web Apps on-premises on private clouds.
- Public Cloud Channel: Office 365 subscription is available to business, corporations and all educational institutions so that they can access Office Web Apps on private clouds hosted by Microsoft.
Features:
Office Web Apps is such an office suite designed and developed by Microsoft, which enables you create, open, and edit office documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and more online. Initially, the application was able to create PDF documents from Office documents and vice-versa. However, in November 2013, Office Web Apps got some new features like ‘real-time co-authoring’ and ‘Auto save word documents’.
Newly Added Features:
As per a recent announcement from Microsoft, Office Web Apps is now going to incorporate some exciting features, such as real-time collaboration of Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel sheets, and more. In other words, you can now work on a document and share it with your colleagues with a link. They can edit that document without having or logging in to an Outlook account. In fact, the overall system is just as you access Google’s online office suite, or Google documents. The most exciting thing about real-time collaboration feature is that you can see where your colleagues are working, which avoids the odds for data conflicts. Meanwhile, all other co-authors will stay on the same page until you are done writing in the document. Consequently, others can develop and evolve new ideas.
There is a different color of cursor for each user editing the document. Moreover, all changes done in the document are applied right at the moment they happen. The concept of collaboration is also added to Office 365 desktop version, which synchronizes all the changes to the documents when it is saved in the cloud. In case one or more of the users working on a document go offline, all the changes he will make, being offline, will be synchronized to the document when the users go online again.
What Else is New?
Along with the newly added features, including real-time collaboration, all the features of the Office Web Apps have been updated, in order to provide it a better look and feel as of the desktop application, such as better formatting controls. Some newly added features include searching for specific words, replacing words as well as phrases, tables’ styles and formatting, header and footer in special documents and presentations, and more.
Looking at the newly added features to Excel Web App introduces the ability to drag and drop cells, reordering of sheets, and quick analysis of different types of data in bulk right in the status bar, which on the other hand includes functions like sum, count, and average of a specified range of cells. Besides, the support for more types of workbooks online, open and interact with spreadsheets with Sheet protection, etc. is also added to the Excel Web App.
On the other hand, the PowerPoint Web App also got some new features added, such as functionality to crop pictures, ability to rename the files right in the editing window. Well, the same is also application for other Office Web Apps.
Additionally, as per a statement of Microsoft, the documents editing features of Office Web Apps soon will land up on other operating system platforms, including Android tablets. Some new features like real-time co-authoring will be added to Office Web Apps very soon, and will be available to those who have been working in Office 365 and SkyDrive.
What Now?
You can start collaborating, as the changes done by Microsoft are rolling out and likely to coincide with Microsoft’s Get It Done Day (#GetItDone!) – a day to shine a light that is show how people across the world use Office 365 and relative productivity tools to complete their daily work. Well, all the newly added features and real-time co-authoring capabilities will be publicized very soon, and the people using SkyDrive and Office 365 will be able to access those features.
Moreover, Microsoft promised to provide all the features that were intended to publicize earlier. Currently Microsoft is working on a track to find a way to enable editing on Android platform as well, which eventually is aimed at enabling access to Office files and relative tools on many other devices.
