much narrower range of file-format
options than Google, Zoho or the
full-size Office applications.
Office Web Apps does shine for its
handling of Office’s default OOXML
formats. The Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents I tested rendered
well in my test browsers, offering the
best route I’ve seen for viewing an
Office document as intended without
having a copy of Office installed. In
addition, the print function in the Web
Apps does an excellent job converting
Office documents to PDF format.
I tested the Office Web Apps on
a SharePoint Server 2010 instance
running in our lab, and from a test
version of Microsoft’s Windows Live
service. From Windows Live, I found
new options for creating, editing and
viewing Office documents using
Office Web Apps.
I could start by uploading an existing document or starting a new one.
On our SharePoint, I couldn’t figure out how to create a new document from scratch—the New Document options I found in SharePoint
directed me only to a file upload
function.
I uploaded a Word document
stored in the binary .DOC format to
our SharePoint instance and could
readily view it from my browser.
When I opted to “edit in browser,”
the server alerted me that it would
have to convert my document to the
newer .DOCX format.
The same held true for PowerPoint
and Excel documents stored in the
earlier format. I uploaded a different
document stored in the OpenDocu-ment Format—the default format for
OpenOffice.org, which Office 2010
does support—but found that
there was no way to view, edit
or convert the ODF document
from Office Web Apps.
My test document rendered nicely in both Firefox
and IE. I was able to scroll
through my documents with
ease, with new pages loading
promptly. Links embedded in
my test document worked as
expected, and I could zoom
in and out of the document
in more or less the same way
as with the desktop-based version of Word. I was pleased to
see that the Web version of
My experiences testing the Excel,
PowerPoint and OneNote Web Apps
were similar to what I found with
Word: I could view binary-formatted
Office documents with good fidelity,
but I had to convert to the newer
XML-based formats for editing. ;
e WEEK Labs Managing Editor Jason
Brooks can be reached at jbrooks@
eweek.com.
enhancements to the application’s
data visualization capabilities, such
as in its Pivot Table and PivotChart
features. I could, for instance, narrow
down an unwieldy chart full of NBA
stats by sorting and filtering from a
menu beside my chart. I expect that
these new options for manipulating
charts will help flatten out the learning curve for users who aren’t comfortable with these Excel features.
Microsoft has enhanced the conditional formatting capabilities of Excel
with easy-to-apply visuals
such as in-cell data bars.
With my basketball stats, I
was able to highlight a stat
column, apply a data bar
conditional formatting element and watch as a bar
appeared in each of the
column’s cells, representing the size of the cell’s
value relative to the rest of
the values in my selection.
I also imported the statistics for a single player
across a 10-year span and
illustrated the rise and fall
of that player’s stats in a
compact single-cell chart
called a sparkline. I could
add details to my sparkline charts,
such as highlighting the high and
low points on the curve.
Office Web Apps
After testing Office Web Apps in
its in-development and final versions,
I’d say that while it is off to a solid
start in the areas of usefulness and
cross-platform support, there’s still
plenty of work to be done before it
catches up to the better-established
office Web applications from Google
and Zoho. Features such as a word
count function in Word are missing, and the Office Web Apps offer a
OFFICE 2010 FROM PAGE 20
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PowerPoint and Word both have an option embedded in their
Ribbons for inserting screenshots of active windows into documents or presentations. Choosing this option spawned a dialog
with thumbnails of all the open windows on my test machine.
