The New Microsoft Office Web Apps: Still Free, Still Almost Good Enough

With Microsoft’s “new” Office Web Apps, released in preview form last week, one thing remains the same: while it’s fine for simple content creation, users still risk the frustration of opening an Office document and finding it too complex for Microsoft’s minor-league Web app to handle.

The new version of Office Web Apps isn’t in general distribution, but Microsoft isn’t hiding it, either. Users can access it via SkyDrive or as part of the Office 365 preview.

So I decided to give Office Web Apps a try in the real world, and see how it worked with everyday business documents. Perhaps a bit foolishly, I started with my resume.

A few weeks ago, you see, I handed in my laptop to my old employer, about the time that Google hosted its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco. On a whim, I held off buying a new Windows notebook (I also have a MacBook) and decided to work from the Chrome OS-based, Web-centric Samsung Chromebox that Google seeded developers with at the show. By design, this machine completely lacks the ability to run Windows applications, let alone Office.

The problem was that the new version of Office Web Apps failed to load a formatted resume that I used as my initial test document. A resume! I fiddled, cursed, and then concluded that Office Web Apps couldn’t cut it. Fortunately for Microsoft, that one document appeared to be an exception.

The issue, as ReadWriteWeb’s Scott Fulton has so elegantly explained, is that Office Web Apps was designed in the shadow of Office, and the looming “Open in Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc.” above the toolbar serves as a constant reminder that you’re not using the real thing. (Of course, with the announcement of the cloud-centric Office 365, all versions of Office are being sucked into the cloud vortex. Office 365 provides the same full-featured functionality as “the new Office,” but with a monthly subscription option and cloud support. Think of Office Web Apps as a “lite” version of Office 365, available for free.)

Almost – But Not Quite

With Office, Microsoft must add enough features to justify an upgrade. But within the Office core remains a feature set that’s “good enough” for most users. Microsoft seems to have made a conscious decision to almost, but not quite, reach this threshold with Office Web Apps.

Take Word, for example. In 2010, the first release of Office Web Apps lacked the ability to add footnotes and resize pictures. Two years later, this is still the case. Oddly enough, picture manipulation, including resizing, has been added to the Web Apps version of PowerPoint. (Office’s big Web rival, Google Docs, included footnote support a couple of years ago.) I actually felt a bit embarrassed reading the blog post authored by Mike Morton, Microsoft group program manager for Web applications, touting the ability to change the page size, orientation, margins, paragraph spacing, indentation, and other Word layout features. Really, Mike? You waited until 2012 to enable this?