Office Word Web App

There is now a web based version of Microsoft Word that you can access on the internet using your browser. The Word Web App provides the rich functionality that you expect from your desktop version of Microsoft Word – on the web. As it is a hosted solution, no software needs to be installed on your computer and you can use the Word Web App anywhere where there is access to an internet browser or mobile phone.

The file format used by the Word Web App is .docx, just like Word 2007 and Word 2010. This means that all new documents you create using the Word Web App will use the .docx extension. You can, however upload documents created by earlier versions of Word that use the .doc extension. You will be able to view these documents as .doc, but if you need to edit them you must convert them to .docx. This is an easy single click process, so don’t worry about that.

Using Microsoft Word With The Word Web App

There are two ways of getting an existing Microsoft Word document into the Word Web App. If you are working on a document in your desktop version of Word, you can save it to a location in SkyDrive. The Word Web App can subsequently open it there. Alternatively, you can upload your document within the Word Web App. We’ll be looking at both of these options in more detail in later tutorials.

Similarly, there are two ways for getting documents off the web and into Microsoft Word. Within the Word Web App you can take an option to open the document directly in Word, or you can download the document to your hard drive and then open it in Word. If you open the document directly in Word, any changes you make to the document are reflected in the web version, whereas if you download the document first, you then have two documents that can easily get out of sync. We’ll also be looking at these two methods later, too.

Of course, the big selling point of the Word Web App is that it’s a free version of Microsoft Word!