Review: Microsoft Office Web Apps

With Office 2010, Microsoft has taken an important (and inevitable) step into internet-stored media. That's right; MS is all up in the cloud now.

In addition to releasing its new native Office suite, which gives you the option to save your files on the Intertubes, Microsoft has rolled out free, lightweight web versions of Office apps accessible through Windows Live.

We took several Office apps for a test ride: Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The verdict? For the most part, this is a decent web suite that works well with the native Office apps, though it's still a little unrefined.

Word on the Web

In your Windows Live account, you can share and access Office web app media through your "SkyDrive." Viewing a Word document looks fine in the browser, but when you choose to edit the doc, you lose some formatting. Paragraph indentations were lost, creating leaning towers of confusing text. Microsoft acknowledged this issue and said a fix is in the works.

Other formatting, such as bolded or italicized text remains, too. You also lose some graphics (we noticed several graphs were MIA) and some highlights are inaccurate. If there's a missing element, the Word web app inserts a small symbol to represent it.

The Office web apps behave very differently from Google Docs, in which all writing and editing is done inside the browser with collaboration occurring in real time. Microsoft designed Office 2010, so most of the fancy formatting work is done inside the native app. The idea is you and your cohorts can apply light edits using the web apps in the browser.

Collaboration doesn't occur in real time, either. Instead, you mark a document as ready for editing, or you restrict it to avoid interruptions. That's basically an efficient way to take turns co-authoring a document online.

Both Microsoft Word 2010 and Windows Live are crammed with too many options, and getting the online-sharing option started took more steps than an AA meeting. Because of the lack of paragraph indentations, our preferred workflow for co-authoring a document is still to compose it in real time using Google Docs, then to format it inside Microsoft Word.

PowerPoint Online

The PowerPoint web app is actually pretty good at retaining fidelity of a presentation created with native PowerPoint. Graphics, formatting and various fonts remain the same when editing inside the browser.

The major element missing from the web version of PowerPoint is the ability to add multimedia elements, like audio or video files, inside a presentation. Still, most would do the majority of their presentation creation inside the native PowerPoint app, and the ability to edit slides in a browser should be very useful for road warriors.

The coolest online-sharing feature for PowerPoint — real-time broadcasting — lives inside the native app, not the browser version. In PowerPoint 2010, you can share your slideshow online just by sending someone a URL. And if there's no projector in the room you can just send around a URL and everybody can view the presentation live on their laptop or smartphone

Excel Web App

Again, Excel loses some graphical elements compared to the spreadsheets made with the native app, but this seems less important when most of your editing should consist of lightweight number crunching, inserting new columns and so on — all of which work fine in the web app. When you're saving to your Skydrive on the web, Excel notifies you about the elements that won't be viewable in the internet version, which is quite helpful.

Excel web app spreadsheets look faithful compared to those created natively. Shaded boxes remained; rows and columns look proportionately correct. Like Word's web app, Excel online can't display rich 3-D graphs or other complex graphics, but it does denote missing elements with the aforementioned symbols.

Well, Should I Get This?

Given its price ($0), the Office web suite is compelling. Though purchasing Office 2010 ($500) would certainly complement the web suite, it's not necessary if all you need are the basic functions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Many will feel tempted to compare the Office web apps with Google Docs head to head, but the two suites behave very differently. Office web apps are designed for those who need to make stylized edits to their documents — think students writing essays, or job seekers preparing résumés. Google Docs is for those who care only about accessing and sharing data, not about looks (cough, bloggers).