Microsoft’s pared-down, ‘in-the-clouds’ version of its Office productivity suite – Office Web Apps – has rolled out today across Ireland and the UK.
Office Web Apps is direct competition to Google Apps – with the ability to both create and edit Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote files but its first advanatge is the fact it obviously integrates easily with the offline full version of Microsoft Office.
As Microsoft announced a few weeks ago, Web Apps Live is integrated into the existing SkyDrive, a free cloud storage service that allows users to store documents, images and even audio files to the tune of 25GB and which will now serve as a storage place for Office Web Apps files.
The Web App version of the full Office is lightweight and only has a fraction of the features you will find on the full software version but it does have a few different fonts inside Word and several templates for creating PowerPoint presentations, plus it works quite well when editing your own documents previously created inside Office and uploaded to SkyDrive.
By Marie Boran
Photo: A PowerPoint presentation as rustled up inside Office Web Apps
