If you get access to Office via your browser, what’s on offer now? Only half.
Microsoft is gradually rolling out browser-based versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. If you have a Windows Live / Hotmail login you might receive an invitation to join the pre-release trials.
If you accept the invitation, what do you get? At the moment it includes only Excel and Powerpoint – Word and OneNote editing features have yet to appear.
Immediately after accepting the invite you get a message telling you the service is ready and all you have to do is click on ‘New’ to create a document. Nice theory, but there’s no ‘New’ menu item to be seen.
If you return to the main Skydrive window, the changes appear.
Click on the Documents folder and finally the New menu appears:
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So you decide to try making a Word document – click on ‘Microsoft Word document’ and you don’t get very far:
That’s not a very promising start even for a beta/preview/trial/pre-release or whatever Microsoft wants to call it.
Same problem with OneNote:
There’s more luck making an Excel document online:
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And PowerPoint
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Unlike installed software, web applications can be updated almost any time by the provider. So we’d expect / hope that Word and Onenote editing appears for preview users very soon.
See Also
- Avoid Windows Live confusion
- A preview of Office Web Application demos
- Office web apps start on Windows Live
- Office 2010 and web apps: apply for the beta
- Office on the Web – the naming
- Office 2010 – web apps preview
- Microsoft to Extend Office to the Browser
- Google Apps – another step towards MS Office