Microsoft's Office Web Apps: The PowerPoint Test
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Yesterday, I took a test drive of the Technical Preview of Microsoft's Office Web Apps, its cloud-based productivity suite accessible to Windows Live subscribers. That Technical Preview (open for "a limited time" in the words of Nick Simons, program manager of Office Web Apps) allows users to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser, and edit Excel and PowerPoint files. As I described Oct. 27, viewing Word files was flawless. My difficulty came with Excel files: While I could upload, view and then download a spreadsheet, I could only perform in-browser editing if the original uploaded file had been in ".xlsx" format, as opposed to ".xls." This meant that, if I wanted to edit via the browser, my original documents needed to be created in Microsoft Office 2007. A small quibble for people who purchased a PC preinstalled with Office relatively recently--but for users working on aged PCs running older software, this could potentially become an issue. After testing out Excel, I also tried out the PowerPoint Web App:
It had the same ease of use as Word and Excel--the uploading, downloading and viewing of a PowerPoint document (with file extension ".ppt") were flawless--but the same issue with older file formats reared its head when I tried a little in-browser editing:
"To edit this file in PowerPoint Web App it first must be converted to the newest file format. This will also create a backup of the original file," read the error message. "To edit this file without converting it, open it in Microsoft PowerPoint." Originally, I planned to finish this post by comparing Web Apps with Google Apps, but considering the former is still in technical preview, I felt that would be unfair--especially as Google Apps has spent quite some time adding functionality and working out bugs. But I find Microsoft's focus on newer file formats somewhat disquieting. Is it a technical issue? Or does Microsoft want to push users, however it can, onto newer platforms? I ran a query past Microsoft earlier this afternoon, and was told that the Office team would get back to me "in the next couple of days." I'm interested in hearing what they'll say. |
Comments (3)
The reason is Google can read lots of docs but they butcher them. They simply convert to HTML. That's why stuff starts missing if you upload. Microsoft is clearly using the browser on a different level to solve this issue thus your documents look great. It's a huge endeavor. See Google's own Help files below with the big warning. "Convert to HTML" isnt a big deal.
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603 "Please note that when importing files into Google Documents, the content will be converted into HTML. After conversion, the content can sometimes be larger (in some cases significantly larger), and the 500k limit applies to this post-conversion size. As a result, certain documents that are under 500k in their original format may still still be too large to upload."
Posted by Jamie | October 28, 2009 7:22 PM
You can open and save Office 2007 files using Office 2003, too. There is a free addon from Microsoft. BTW the new format is much better than the older (smallest and well documented).
Posted by Max | October 29, 2009 3:10 AM
Great post! That document looks awesome and I am glad to hear that everything worked so smoothly. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Web Apps. Tell us more at http://www,facebook.com/officelive
Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Live Outreach Team
Posted by Andy | October 29, 2009 4:52 PM