In an earlier post I mentioned how Microsoft had released its Office Web Apps for limited preview. And in another post I also mentioned how you need to be constantly improving you information sources as simply relying on technical experience no longer cuts it these days. Why do I mention these two posts? Well, I was browsing through my regular information sources when I came across a way to get onto the Office Web Apps preview program. Now this information didn’t come from Microsoft but I can tell you that I managed to get onto the program as you can see from the screen shot below.
Here’s Excel running in a browser window.
What I can say after some initial fiddling with Office Web Apps is that it only has very limited functionality but that is to be expected in a technical preview, but what I have seen so far is impressive. It is really just like Excel. Doing all the basics is the same, adding cells, creating formulas, customizing text, etc. As you can also see from the above screen shot, you also have a couple of options to download the files you create to your local machine, otherwise it remains in Skydrive. Nice.
From this screen shot you can see that under the Office Live Apps preview I have the ability to create (and use) Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote all on the web.
Now that I’m in the program I’ll be interested to see how it pans out and what features start to work their through. I’ll also be interested to compare what the Office Web Apps version has compared to the desktop version of Office 2010, which I’m also running. Now all I need is a beta copy of SharePoint 2010 to play with and I’ll be in heaven. Anyone know how to get onto that beta?
CIAOPS 