Free version of MS Office to go live soon. So far, mostly so good.
So, the good news is,Microsoft Web Apps goes live in June. Bad news? I’ll get to that in a minute…
Web Apps is the free version of Microsoft Office 2010 – a direct competitor to Google Docs. Free versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will all be available once Office 2010 hits retail stores. Currently, the beta is available only to those customers with 2010 Software Assurance already purchased. Microsoft claims that Web Apps will have more features than Google Docs (but less than the paid version of Office), and a nicer interface. So far, I can’t find a feature list, though.
If they can pull off a full-featured rendering of the document in browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari are planned) that will be a huge improvement over Google Docs, which I have seen destroy formatting on more than one occasion. This looks to me to be an excellent entry point into cloud computing for home users who are reluctant to give up the interface they are used to, and have been paying for Office just to keep the look consistent. For what it’s worth, I hacked out this blog post over atdocs.comand easily found the features I needed available. There was a reasonable choice of fonts, spell check, etc. I assume this is a reasonable facsimile of what will be available in the free version of Word when Web Apps launches.
What’s the bad news? I had to write this up twice. I had finished my typing, clicked on the view tab to see the reading view instead of editing view, and the document was blank. I guess I should have saved it first, sure, but why would I assume that a view change would delete my work? Grrrrrr. To be fair, it’s still in beta, but that is a pretty basic function, and a HUGE annoyance. Google saves as you go, like a web app should.
Update: when I tried to copy and paste the post from the Word Web App to WordPress, it would only do one paragraph at a time. Copy/Paste into a local copy of Word was flawless, though, so it may be a WordPress issue.
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