Microsoft adds some more features to their online service, including printing.
Microsoft’s online version of Office – Office Web Apps has been revised with some extra features including printing.
A major difference between the traditional Office software and the online service is how they are updated. Software is updated with a rush of new features, mostly when you buy and install a new version. Online services can be updated in a more gradual way with new and updated features coming every few months.
So back in June 2010 Office Web Apps went fully public and only three months later there are new features being added.
Printing in Word
The Print item has been added to the File menu, but in the Word Web App only – not in Excel, Powerpoint or OneNote.
Print was already available, but only in the separate Reading view.
Excel – charting
Insert Charts is now available on the Insert tab
Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, Scatter, Doughnut and Radar charts are available.
Once inserted you have some options for tweaking the chart. Click on the chart and a Chart Tools tab will appear.
Don’t expect all the choices you have in Excel software.
Excel – autofill handle
Now you can put a formula into one cell, then copy it to adjacent cells by dragging the source cell down or across. This is one of those features that most Excel users take for granted these days, until they find it didn’t work in the browser based version.
Click on the source cell with the formula to be copied then place the mouse pointer over the bottom left corner so the cursor changes to a cross:
Sequential autofill also works. Select cells with the numbers 1 and 2 then drag to other cells which will be populated with 3, 4, 5 etc. The increment is set by the difference between the two source cells eg cells 2 and 4 will extend to 6, 8, 10 etc.
PowerPoint – add clipart
The Word Web App could already access the Office Clipart library, now a Clipart button has been added to the Insert tab. Microsoft boasts that this lets you choose from over 200,000 royalty free images and drawings.
PowerPoint – more themes
When you make a new presentation you’re given the choice of some pre-defined themes. An unstated number of extra themes are now provided.
In-house and hosted Office Web Apps
At this stage these changes are limited to Live.com users. The original Office Web Apps download for installing on hosted and in-house servers, as an extra for Sharepoint, doesn’t appear to have been updated.
See Also
- Excel Online – changing date format
- Office 365 – is it anything new?
- Office Web Apps, questions about the Chrome App
- Office Web Apps – dive in and try ’em
- Getting started with Office Web Applications
- Why can’t I use Office Web Apps?
- Office web apps start on Windows Live