Office Web App Preview.

I can’t say that I’m completely looking forward to the world many speak of where all of our apps and OSes are cloud-based, but I do like the idea of a decent web Office app program. Being able to modify one document and access it anywhere with changes intact has always appealed to me. However, I must have been hiding under a rock for the last few months because it took me stumbling across Ian Paul’s PCWorld article to notice that Microsoft is now offering an open preview of their Office Web Apps right now. All you will need is a free Windows Live account. It’s quite easy to miss the preview invitation seeing that it is a very small link only seen when accessing documents on SkyDrive. For those looking to test out the new Office web apps, here’s how:

Log into your Live account.

Access your documents via SkyDrive.

You will need to enter the preview by clicking on the link that says Join our preview program and Accept the end-user license agreement.

You should be taken back to a list of your SkyDrive documents. To open a new web app, click on the New button and then choose which type of file you’d like to create.

When I tried, Word and One Note previews were down with the following message:

However, Powerpoint and Excel worked just fine (images below).

Of course, you are not going to get the full feature set offered in the desktop suite, but from what I’ve seen so far, all of my documents and files have opened without any distortion or missing items. This is still an early preview, but for someone desperately looking for a cloud-based Google Doc’s replacement, Microsoft seems to be headed in the right direction.

Source -
Office Web App Preview | Windows 7 News

An Office Web App would sound great to me considering I'm in college... I can think of all the work I could get done at my friend's houses as well as anywhere else I'd be at the moment...

Thanks for this post.

By the way, do you guys visit Paul Thurrott's site at winsupersite.com?

He has an article explaining microsoft office word app...With an image of it that has tabs and everything. He seems to have access to the actual programs, not just a page that says "still to come..."

Does anybody know how to access that? Is it a connect group?