When I first heard the news that Microsoft has launched a free version of its Office Web Apps, I immediately sat down to try it out and thought I would write this blog with this new product. But wait! Free? When did Microsoft start offering free Office? Imagine my disappointment when I found that I couldn’t access it from here! This service is only available to Windows Live users in USA, Canada, Great Britain and Ireland for now.
So, no firsthand experience, but from I have read, these web apps are stripped down versions of Microsoft Office. Some users have encountered bugs, which I am sure Microsoft will fix shortly. The files will be saved on SkyDrive which boasts of 25 GB storage space. These web apps have retained the ‘ribbon’, which debuted in office 2007. Functionality wise, Word comes closest to the desktop suite. What you can’t do is change margins, create columns, access footnotes or comments. On the downside, unlike Google docs, which saves automatically, you have to press the save button every time. Excel doesn’t offer users to change the layout of the cells, nor to insert pie charts or other graphics. Web Power Point doesn’t allow clip arts to be inserted, given that Microsoft has a lot of clip art on the web, is a foolish oversight. Graphic elements cannot be added too. Users cannot insert pdfs and web clippings in Web One Note. In short, Web Office has just the basic features of desktop Office.
Microsoft is ready to launch the newest addition to its products by launching Office 2010 next week. To protect its profit making suite, Microsoft insists that Web Office is just a companion to desktop Office and is meant for light work. When one user tried to open the online file in his desktop Office, he couldn’t do it because apparently, you need Office 2010 for opening it. The message is loud and clear. Microsoft wants users to buy Office 2010 to get the features that web Office lacks. It wants consumers to do things the way it wants, rather than Google, which seems to be more customer oriented. With cloud computing on the rise, web tools like these will find a boost. Other alternatives to web Office are Google docs and Zoho. These applications have a lot more features than web office. Personally, I am sure many people would continue to use desktop Office for offline work and Google docs for online docs. Microsoft has introduced these free web apps so as not to be left behind in the web wars. Web Office is bait for people to catch and be forced to buy Office 2010. Web Office seems to be a pawn in this fierce battle for supremacy.
What do you think of this new development by Microsoft? Do you think it will be popular or die a premature death? Are you more comfortable using Google Docs? Give in your opinion.
My favorite is still Google Docs, Zoho and OpenOffice and I can use all these on Ubuntu 10.04.
For now, the Google Docs suite is the clear winner for online office editing tools. You have features like forms that are not available with many other products. It can also be used on various platforms as you mentioned.
I think for now it is sureshot google..
I saw the demo of new weboffice, the demo showed that weboffice was too slow for which the presenter justified that it was the largest java script application on the web. I however don’t forsee Microsoft taking the place of google..atleast in the near future