14 DAY TRIAL // Office 365 is now in Beta stage, with Microsoft planning to launch its Cloud productivity offering in 2011. But as customers start leveraging Office in the Cloud, and especially the Office Web Apps component of Office 365, it’s important for them to understand just what type of files are supported. According to the Redmond company, Office Web Apps are designed to play nice with all documents created in Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint starting with Office 97.
But this doesn’t mean that customers running older versions of Office will get to use docs in the native formats of those releases with Office Web Apps.
Instead, and this is a caveat of Office 365, Office Web Apps is set up to help users make the transition to the modern file formats that the software giant introduced starting with Office 2007.
After all, the company did put a lot of work into developing and then standardizing Open XML to not have customers take advantage of it.
In this sense, Microsoft informs that “older file formats (such as .doc, .xls, .ppt) are automatically converted to Open XML format (such as docx, .xlsx, .pptx) for editing since Office Web Apps natively supports only the newer file formats. There is no option to save documents in the binary formats.”
The same is valid for Excel and SharePoint documents that are accessed using Microsoft’s Cloud productivity offering.
“The Excel Web App on SharePoint supports only the newer Excel files formats (including .xlsx, .xlsb, and .xlsm). These can be created in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or later or using the compatibility pack with older versions of Excel,” Microsoft stated.
“The Excel Web App on SkyDrive enables viewing and editing (after conversion) of older .xls files.”
And of course, OneNote is no exception to this rule. “The OneNote Web App supports only files created in Microsoft OneNote 2010 (or the Web App),” the company said.
Users can also check out the graphic included with this article, courtesy of Microsoft, in order to get a detailed view of all the file formats supported by Office Web Apps in Office 365.
