The Ribbon In The Word Web App

The Word Web App is the free web equivalent of Microsoft Word 2010. Being hosted in “the cloud”, the Word Web App enables you to view and work on your Word documents anywhere that you have access to an internet connection and a browser. However, because the Office Web Apps are a hosted solution, there is a limited feature set available to users.

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:

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:

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:

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