office 2010 news

As promised earlier, we will bring you a little more in-depth overview of Office 2010 Web Apps.

Firstly, it has to be said that Office Web Apps is still very much in the development phase, and it is expected that the the functionality will improve greatly before the official launch in 2010. That said, currently Office Web Apps are not even close to reaching the functionality of its main competitors Google Docs and Zoho. There are, however, some aspects in which Office shows strenght and innovation so let’s take a closer look at Office Web Apps and it’s pros and cons:

Pros

Most notabe of all, the system seems to be incredibly stable. Our team of two editors played around with Office Web Apps for almost three hours each, and during this time neither of us experienced any stability issues, even though both of us were using Google Chrome as our Internet Browser, which isn’t even in the official compatibility list announced in Microsoft’s MSDN blog earlier this year. Needless to say, this is very surprising, given that up until very recently, even Microsoft’s online flagship Hotmail had major problems with browsers such as Chrome and Firefox! 10 points to Microsoft!

As expected, Microsoft Office 2010’s popular SmartArt diagrams have been included in Web Apps as well – I’m sure there’s a great segment of MS Office users who love this feature and definitely prefer Office Web Apps over its competitors just because of this. We, however, are not big fans of “bells and whistles” and rather value stability and comfortability of creating/editing “simple” documents so let’s move on to:

Cons

Having said that Word and Powerpoint include some nice and unique features, the web edition of Microsoft Excel seems to lack even some of the most widely used options such as Charts. Surely, not all the features that the official launch of Office Web Apps will see are integrated into the current Technical Preview – but as people who have beta-tested a number of software applications, we would expect features as important as this to be included from very early on.

Something that Microsoft promised and delivered is collaboration – but unfortunately, there’s still a lot to be done in the development this functionality. While Office Web Apps does allow co-authoring of a document, it feels pretty bizarre and most certainly doesn’t live up to the standards shown by its competitors. For instance, there is no indication on who is editing what, so people can easily edit the very same part of the document, effectively overwriting the content another person is currently working on. Further to this, collaborating disables the undo and redo functionality, so there is no way to get rid of the changes once discovering what’s been happening.

File sharing is something that Office Web Apps supports as well, but in our opinion this is another part that could’ve been done a lot better. Even if we leave out the fact that, in order to edit the files, both parties have to have a Windows Live ID, the awkwardness of sharing files is something that clearly indicates a non-fully-developed system. Mainly, one can only share folders, and not individual files – also, the folder has to be a root-level folder and not a subfolder deep in your folder structure. This, effectively, means that we’re moving further away from the “click and share” vision, having to first move each file we want to share into a designated directory that we create and then share out.

Conclusion

As said before, we at Office 2010 News surely think that there’s a lot to be done with regards to the continuous development of the Web Apps. Given that Microsoft has until mid-2010 before they launch the final version, we will definitely see some major improvements and seeing the stability of the Technical Preview, it is actually very possible that Office Web Apps will, after the official launch, move past Google Docs and Zoho in terms of functionality as well.

Stay tuned for more screenshots and inside information!