Microsoft’s Office Web Apps: Part 1—A Test Drive of Word

I am keying the copy (text) for this posting using the Microsoft Word Web App "in the cloud". Some people might be saying: "Errrr. Okay. What is the Word Web App and how is it being used in the cloud?" Others will just be shaking their heads and saying to themselves "Oh, no. Not this flipping Internet cloud crap again."

In a way the Word Web App and the cloud are sort of the same thing.

To try and make this make a little more sense, for those who are totally confused, Microsoft now has feature-limited "free" versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote available that work from within a browser from the Internet. For the 'best' experience you need to use the IE8 or IE9 browsers, but the Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, etc.,) will also work with slightly reduced functionality using FireFox or Chrome. I am not sure if they work from Opera or Safari because I have not tried them but am pretty sure that they will.

For this little test drive I am using the Word Web App via FireFox v3.6 and it seems to work reasonably well. Obviously using a word processor via the Internet is not as responsive (quick) as using a 'real' copy of Word installed locally on a computer. I am a touch-typist and I can frequently get almost a full word ahead of what has been echoed onto the screen—and backspacing can be frustrating as I find I often backspaced one or two characters too far due to the echo delay (then have to re-key the mistakenly backspaced text back in).

Just how well the character-echo on the screen keeps up will depend on your Internet link and other traffic on your network. If you have Vuze, or BitTorrent, or some other torrent client running on your network, and you are downloading as well as allowing uploads of torrent files, then I suspect the quickness of Word Web App from the Internet might get very sluggish.  But, all things considered, I have to admit that the responsiveness (quickness) surprised me and it probably is just about fast enough to make it usable even using a relatively slow 3G dongle to connect to the Internet; which I did not expect to be the case.

Obviously keying content for a blog post is not a very demanding test. There are no headers or footers required, no tables, no use of custom styles, no bulleted lists, no numbered points, no text boxes, and in this case, there are no included graphics. Any graphics that I use will be added when I cut and paste this copy (text) over into Live Writer ready for posting; because I can't see in Word Web App (I wonder if WWA is an allowable abbreviation?) how it is actually going to layout (format) for posting—whereas I can in Live Writer.

The more common shortcut keys like Ctrl+S to do a file save seem to work. But some shortcuts, for example Ctrl+Shift+L to start a bulleted list, don’t work. Double-clicking a word to select the word works, but triple-clicking to select a paragraph does not work. Also using the back-wards arrow at the start of the line to select text line-by-line does not work. There also does not appear to be any way to create your own styles. If this is the case then you are stuck with the pre-defined styles.

All keying is done in what Word refers to as “Editing View” view. While this is okay for entering up content for a site posting I doubt if anyone who is used to working in Page Layout mode in Word when they are entering text will be very happy with it.

To see how your document looks in its printed format you need to do a ‘Print Preview’—which they actually call a ‘Reading View’ for some reason. Switching to 'Reading View' is marginally painful. You have to save first and then go to View and select "Reading View". If you forget to save first then you will get asked to save when you select "Reading View".

Printing a document is a little strange. When you "print" the document gets distilled into an Adobe PDF file first and then the printing occurs via Adobe Reader in the background. This approach works reasonably well but it is a round-a-bout way to print something.

Microsoft most likely have a document somewhere on their site telling you all the things that don't work, or work differently, when using the Word Web tools. Right now I can't be bothered trying to find it—I am away from home finishing off this post from a motel unit. If I find something at a later time then I will post about that in a future post.

So … considering it has such limited functionality … you might ask why am I using the Word Web App instead of the locally installed Word, which I have on all my PCs? The answer is: Because it is in the cloud. And because it is in the cloud (i.e., somewhere on the Internet) I can use this copy of Word from anywhere. Also, it’s free. More importantly, when I use it from anywhere, the file I was working on is there ‘in the cloud’ as well. So I can use Word Web App to work on my file from any computer that can connect to the Internet. Presumably I could use it from a smartphone, although I have not tried that, or from an iPad or the Samsung Galaxy PAD (or whatever computer with a browser on it). This means I can add thoughts or notes to a potential site posting while at work—during lunch time for example. I simply bring up a Web browser on my work PC and go to the Microsoft Live site, login, and there are my files and I can update them using Word Web App.

The alternative to doing this is to keep all my little posts that I have as works-in-progress on a USB thumb drive. Then I have to remember to keep it with me so I plug it into whatever computer I have handy. I also have to hope that the files don’t corrupt, which is not uncommon on a USB thumb drive.

This entire posting, not including the images (which were added later in Live Writer), was keyed up and spell checked using the Word Web App.