The process for printing in the Word Web App is very much the same as that used in the desktop version of Word 2010: click the File tab > Print.

When you click on Print, the print dialogue window that you are probably already used to seeing opens for you to make selections such as:

• what printer to use
• what pages to print
• how many copies
• etc

Click to enlarge

When you have made your selections, click OK and the document will be sent to the printer.

The print facility is also available in the PowerPoint Web App (in both Edit and View modes), but is missing from the Excel Web App.

The Word Web App, on the other hand, is not so sophisticated. The way it handles concurrent updates is to simply prevent two users from editing the same document at the same time. This means that if your collegue opens a document first, you will have to wait until they have saved their changes and closed that document before you can open it yourself.

If you do try to open a document that is being edited by someone else, you will see the following message:

Although you will not be able to open the document for editing yourself, you will be able to view the document by clicking on it. It’s only the Edit In Browser option that is unavailable.

The presentation certainly didn’t look like the above movie. In fact, most of the transitions looked like the Fade transition in the PowerPoint Web App. It’s surprising that Microsoft couldn’t do a better job of rendering the transitions, as they use silverlight to present them i.e. browser limitations are not to blame.

On a related note, when you edit a presentation in the Web App, you won’t see the little “rushing star” indication that a transition is present. There is also no way to add new, or edit existing, transitions either. Thankfully though, if you do make a change to your presentation using the PowerPoint Web App, and later open the same presentation in PowerPoint 2010, you’ll find that all transitions remain intact. It’s just that you can’t see them properly in the PowerPoint Web App.

• Word Web App
• Excel Web App
• PowerPoint Web App
• OneNote Web App

As they are a hosted solution (all software and date is stored in the “cloud”), you don’t need to install any software on your computer. This means that as long as you have a web browser and an internet connection, you can view and edit Office documents.

That goes for PowerPoint presentations, too.

To give you an idea of what functionality is available in the PowerPoint Web App, here is the ribbon found in that application:

As you can see, compared with Office PowerPoint 2010, the ribbon provides a very limited feature set. The most noticeable ommission is the ability to add transitions to your slides.

However, extra tabs do appear in the ribbon when you insert objects that require their own contextual tabs to modify them. One such tab is the SmartArts Tool tab. When you insert an item of SmartArt, you will see the following SmartArt Tools contextual tab appear in the ribbon:

Click To Enlarge

Similarly, when you insert a picture into one of your slides, the Picture Tools tab appears in the ribbon:

Sharing Documents

Consider the situation where you create a document using the desktop version of Office Word 2010 and then decide to share it with your intrepid and daring colleague who volunteered to report on the mud wresting finals in California. You laid out the rough itinery in the initial document and then you uploaded it to SkyDrive for your colleague to edit and update (learn how to save a document in Word 2010 to SkyDrive). Your colleague makes their changes and then saves them to the same location in SkyDrive.

The next day, you want to see what’s been added to the document. How do you find the most recent version of the document?

Recent Documents

Ordinarily, you might use the Recent Documents section in the Backstage View. However, when you click the File tab > Recent, there are two documents with the correct file name at the top of the list. Which one should you choose? One item in the list will refer to the initial document you created in Word 2010, while the other will refer to the Word Web App version. The path to the document appears under the name of the document, and the web version will have a path that looks like https://obh7ij.docs.live.net/621dsew320ffg/Sample Documents. It actually looks like a web address, or URL. The version you edited in Word, on the other hand, will have a path that relates to the folder structure on your hard drive, for example My Documents\Office Web Apps. These paths refer to two different documents. If you know that your colleague made changes after you last saved the document, you should open the web version.

Opening the document is as simple as clicking on it. When you click on the web version, you will be asked to log in to your SkyDrive account, if you haven’t already. Opening the web document will take a lot longer than opening the document stored on your hard drive because Word has to establish a connection with your SkyDrive account and then download it to your computer. Whenever you are performing actions in SkyDrive, remember that you may need to be patient.

After you have opened the web version in Word, you will find that the web version disappears from the Recent Documents list, removing future confusion.

Make sure you open and work on the right document!

The Excel Web App is the web based equivalent of Office Excel 2010 and is freely available to anyone who has an internet connection and a browser. As you can imagine, because functionality is restricted, the ribbon in the Excel Web App holds fewer commands and functions than that found in Excel 2010. For those new to Microsoft Office, the ribbon is the replacement to the file and menu system found in versions of Office prior to the 2007 version.

Here is the ribbon in The Excel Web App.

Note that the only tabs displayed on this ribbon are:

• File
• Home
• Insert

Next time you log in to Office Live Workspace, you’ll see an upgrade now button. This button initiates the process of transferring all your files (and references to them) to SkyDrive. Whilst the upgrade is in progress, you can still view your documents in Live Workspace but you can’t edit them.

Once the upgrade is complete, you will see a folder in SkyDrive named Office Live Documents that holds all files transferred. You can then organise these files how you want by creating new folders in SkyDrive and moving those files into them.

At this point you will no longer be able to access your Office Live Workspace. Additionally, if someone tries to open a document you’ve shared with them, they will be prompted to upgrade in order to access that document.

And a limited featuree set means fewer commands on the ribbon. The ribbon is the replacement to the file/menu system we saw in pre-2007 versions of Office.

Let’s take a look at the ribbon in the Word Web App and compare it to that in its desktop counterpart – Word 2010.

Here’s a screenshot of the ribbon in Word 2010:

Click to enlarge

The follwing tabs are available:

1. Home
2. Insert
3. Page Layout
4. References
5. Mailings
6. Review
7. View
8. Developer

In contrast, the Word Web App has the following, much smaller, selection of tabs on the ribbon:

Click to enlarge

Here, we see the following tabs:

1. Home
2. Insert
3. View

In addition to there being fewer tabs on offer, each tab has fewer commands on it. For example, in Word 2010, you can insert a huge variety of different objects into your document, as the following Insert tab shows:

Click to enlarge

By way of comparision, the Word Web App offers the following insert commands:

The Windows Live site detects what platform is running Office Web Apps, and if it happens to be a mobile device, the Edit in Browser options are disabled. However, after exploring lots of different pages on the site, it was possible for the intrepid CNET researchers to switch to the PC version of the application.

In summary, it appears to be possible to do the following on an iPad:

• create a new notebook (but not edit it)
• create a new Excel spreadsheet and edit it (ding ding ding – we have a winner!)

Although the Excel Web App has a cut down version of the functionality available in Excel 2010, the similarity between the two is unmistakeable.  They both display the ribbon running across the top of the workspace, although the one in the web version displays fewer commands due to its limited feature set.

One noticeable difference between desktop and web programs is the performance time. Calculations in the Excel Web App tend to be performed more slowly than in Excel 2010, as it’s the server that executes them. Data and instructions take time to travel from the computer to “the cloud”, and results take time to return to the computer.

Like Excel 2010, the Excel Web App uses the .xlsx file extension. The Excel Web App actually provides a free way for people who don’t own a copy of Office 2010 to open a .xlsx file.