Office Web Apps

Microsoft's Office Web Apps are nigh.  I've been playing for a while now with Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs saved to my Live SkyDrive (25GB free, online storage) and it works reasonably well.  A document saved to your SkyDrive online storage can be viewed in SkyDrive using Microsoft Office Web Apps and can even be edited online.  If you want, the document can then be opened for more powerful editing in Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2010 (or 2007 or 2003) if it is installed on your desktop.

Now, the online Microsoft Office Web Apps aren't bad - they don't offer the full scale of features that the regular Microsoft Office application suite provides, but for a free, online, edit (almost¹) everywhere Office app that renders documents the same way Office 2010 renders them on your desktop, Office Web Apps is quite usable.

If you want to share OneNote documents between multiple computers - or multiple users - then you don't need to have a SharePoint site set up for this any longer.  I've not yet played with OneNote sharing between multiple machines nor users with Live SkyDrive as we have a SharePoint site, however I probably should, if only to test it out.  SharePoint offers more benefits than just sharing OneNote documents, but for smaller businesses who don't want or need to get a SharePoint site up and running, either locally or hosted, then Live SkyDrive offers OneNote sharing.

Do you want to map your SkyDrive folders to your computer(s)?  Well, have a read of this blog post for how to do this in Windows 7.


¹ Opera 10.53 fails to render any Word documents (at least - if it fails at that, I can't be bothered trying any further until they fix this), however it works fine in Chrome, Firefox and obviously in IE8.  I don't have Safari installed on my Win 7 box so I don't know what Safari support for Office Web Apps is like.  All the browsers I tested, aside from Opera (which is glacial compared to the others, by the way) also open the files for editing.



Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie