14 DAY TRIAL // New Features for Office Web Apps were released yesterday, by the Windows Live Team, which also made Office Web Apps available in seven more countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland.
Three months after the launch of Office Web Apps, over 20 million people in the United States, the UK, Canada and Ireland have used them, along with Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 2010, of course, and the newly-released features are directly inspired by users' feedback.
The concept behind the Office Web Apps is to bring the Office applications to the Inbox case, so that everyone could communicate easily and without destroying or formatting all the other existing documents, said Jason Moore, Principal Lead Program Manager for Windows Live SkyDrive, in a blog post.
Faster access to Office apps is now possible and quite easy: you will see “Open in [Office app]” while browsing your files, and you only have to choose the app you want.
Most of the documents on SkyDrive – 90% - were first created on the desktop, and this application allows you to bring back a document to your desktop, whenever you want to edit it.
One of the coolest new features is being able to embed Excel and PowerPoint documents on your website or on your blog.
Moore said that it has never been easier to have public PowerPoint presentations and Excel workbooks online, and people can watch them in full screen mode, with all the original animations and transitions.
If you need to update data on your Excel spreadsheet, you can do it on your desktop and it will automatically update the version on the web.
Before enjoying publishing interactive PivotTables and forms you might want to have a look on The Office Blog.
Those who are always mobile can access Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents on their phone, the last app being a part of these new updates.
Feedback is very important for the development of these updates so all problems the users had in the past should be fixed now, assured Moore.
A very important novelty is having the Office Web Apps available in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia and Australia, and people who use Office 2010 are privileged as they can get access anytime, anywhere.
Evan Lew, Senior Product Manager for Web Apps, talks about the novelties of Office Web Apps in the following video: