Microsoft Office Web Apps
Last Thursday 17.09.2009 was a really exciting day, Microsoft announced that Office web apps will be available for a selected group of Windows Live users as part of the Office Web Apps Technical Preview.
Well, I am also excited that I was one of those selected users. In order to check if this CTP version is available for your account, sing in to Windows Life and click More> then SkyDrive. You will notice that you have the “New” option beside “Add file” and “Create”, this will allow you to create Office documents and edit them using the Office Web Apps, or if you already have Office document stored in your SkyDrive, just select a file and then you select to “View” or “Edit” that file.
I thought it is interesting to test and evaluate the new Office Web Apps for the common different scenarios to check what features are currently available and what’s not. From another hand I wanted to check the browser compatibility for features and layouts.
My Test environment includes only Windows PCs running on Windows 7 RTM and Windows XP SP3, tested browsers: IE Explorer 8, and Chrome 3 and FireFox 3.5.
Test results:
- All browsers (IE, FireFox and Chrome):
-View and edit files, All features did as supposed to do regarding text formatting, tables, cells, and text alignment.
-Multiple users to edit the same file simultaneously worked properly in the three browsers.
- All working great with Arabic Language, except that the page layout is only left to right and you can't switch it to right to left which is required feature.
-Fire Fox & Chrome:
-All features and scenarios worked properly except that you can’t move your document to continue working on the local machine.
Chrome:
-Bug: In view document mode, the browser doesn’t respond when switching to Edit mode, but the Edit mode works when you select a file then select the Edit mode directly (well, we can’t blame Microsoft, since Chrome is not officially supported by Office web Apps).
Well, This is a great beginning for such an application to share most of its feature on most browsers, even no supported ones. If you have tested the Office Web Apps, please don’t hesitate to share, and add you experience as a comment.
Reference:
Microsoft Office Web Blog.
First Look at Office Web on Channel 9.