Microsoft Office 2010 Boosts Core Features: Review

Web Apps

The aspect of the Office 2010 release that’s most fascinated me is the extension of the suite to include web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Office 2010 isn’t the first version of the suite to reach out to the web, but it is the first release to enable users to get at least some of their Office work done through a web browser. What’s more, as with the version of Outlook Web Access that ships with Exchange 2010, the new Office Web Apps are designed to run well not only on the Windows-only Internet Explorer, but on the cross-platform friendly Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers.

After testing the Office Web Apps in their in-development and final versions over the past several months, I’d say that the while Apps are off to a solid start in these areas of usefulness and cross-platform support, there’s still plenty of work to be done before they catch up to the better-established office web application offerings from Google and Zoho. Basic features such as a word count function in Word are missing, and the Office Web Apps offer a much narrower range of file format options than either Google and Zoho or the full-sized Office applications.

With that said, the Office Web Apps do shine rather brightly for their handling of Office’s default file formats. The Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents I tested with rendered well in my test browsers, offering the best route I’ve seen for viewing an Office document as intended without having a copy of Office installed. In addition, the print function in the Web Apps does an excellent job converting Office documents to PDF format.

I tested the Office Web Apps from a SharePoint Server 2010 instance running in our lab, and from a test version of Microsoft’s Windows Live service. From Windows Live, I found new options for creating, editing and viewing Office documents using Office Web Apps. I could start by uploading an existing document or starting a new one. On our SharePoint, I couldn’t figure out how to create a new document from scratch—the New Document options I found in SharePoint directed me only to a file upload function.

I uploaded a Word document stored in the binary .DOC format to our SharePoint instance, and could readily view it from my browser. When I opted to “edit in browser,” the server alerted me that it would have to convert my document to the newer, .DOCX format in order for me to edit it. The same went for dealing with PowerPoint and Excel documents stored in the earlier format. I uploaded a different document stored in the OpenDocument Format—the default format for OpenOffice.org, which Office 2010 does support—but found that there was no way to view, edit or convert the ODF document from Office Web Apps.

Once I’d opened my test Word document for viewing, the Word Web App promised improved performance and rendering if I installed Silverlight, which I did while testing with Internet Explorer 8. The Silverlight plugin delivered its promised performance improvements while zooming in and out of the documents I viewed. Without the plugin, zoomed-in documents appeared somewhat jagged-looking.

In my tests with Firefox on Linux, I installed Novell’s Moonlight plug-in in an attempt to partake in the promised Silverlight goodness, but the plug-in prevented me from viewing these documents at all. In tests with a previous version of the Web Apps, the presence of the plug-in seemed to have no effect at all, so this is one area where cross-platform support has actually backslid. I had to uninstall the plug-in to get back in business.

With the Silverlight detour behind me, I found that my test document rendered rather nicely in both Firefox and IE. I was able to scroll through my documents with ease, with new pages loading promptly as I moved through the document. Links embedded in my test document, such as those in the table of contents, worked as I expected, and I could zoom in and out of the document in more or less the same way as with the desktop-based version of Word. Also, I was pleased to see that the web version of Word mimics well the handy sidebar-based document search feature that’s new to Word 2010.

Each of the Office Web Apps offered an option for opening the current document directly in its full-sized Office application, but this feature only works on Internet Explorer and Windows. According to Microsoft, the online office applications use WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) as the underlying protocol for this integration, so such a connection should be possible. While testing on Linux, I was able to work around the issues by downloading my test documents, editing them in OpenOffice.org, and then uploading the files back to the web or to SharePoint.

My experiences testing with the Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Web Apps were similar to what I found with Word—in each case, I could view binary-formatted Office documents with good fidelity, but I had to convert to the newer formats for editing.