Microsoft Office Web Apps: Not as expected

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Microsoft has officially launched Office 2010 to the market. However, equally attractive is the appearance of Microsoft Office Web Apps, Microsoft's free office application on the Web including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

In general, web applications are a highlight of Microsoft (MS), which can make users stick with MS Office instead of switching to competitors like Google Docs or Zoho. The online version of Office is not a replacement for the desktop version, but it is an online tool for you to work with if the Office application is not available.

Here are some things that perhaps Microsoft needs to make improvements to its Office Web Apps if it wants to attract more customers.

Add the ability to automatically save documents to Word

Automatic document saving is a clear feature that will be needed. Google Docs is equipped with this feature and MS Excel Web Apps is also equipped, but for some reason MS is not equipped with the Word Web App, which means that you will often take time to click the Save button. AutoSaving feature that Microsoft took a long time to equip the desktop version, even the AutoRecover feature was developed by the company. Hopefully, a similar feature will be included in the Word Web App version to help users avoid problems during use.

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AutoSave allows you to save documents for a period of time

Warning if you accidentally close the card

One problem that users are concerned about using Word is that it does not warn you if you close the working tab that you are working on if you have not already done the changes. This will cause you to regularly conduct the process of working with the document on this application if you do not want to be startled when you remember the process has not been saved.

Support other document formats

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Docx, xlsx, pptx are good but not popular with Office 2003 format

If you want to use Microsoft Web Apps, you can only save and download MS Office 2007 format documents including docx, xlsx and pptx. This will be a big problem for those who only want to use the MS Office 2003 doc, xls, ppt format. It will also be more convenient if you can work with other popular formats such as RTF, csv html and pdf which are supported by Google Docs and Zoho.

Obviously, Microsoft wants to encourage people to update their new Office software and switch to newer file formats, but this kind of encouragement makes users more uncomfortable.

Expand the ability to fully support features for web browsers

One of the interesting features of Office Web Apps is that it allows users to simply click on a button to open a document directly in the desktop. If you're editing data in Excel, just click the ' Open in Excel ' button, your data will open as if you were working with a desktop application, but you still have to save it online. The problem is that this feature only works with Firefox and IE browsers on Windows, does not work with all web browsers on a Mac.

The main reason is that the functions in Excel, Word, OneNote and PowerPoint are based on Microsoft's ActiveX platform, which is not available on Mac or other browsers in Windows such as Chrome, Opera, and Safari. It would be better if Microsoft could extend this functionality to all browsers and Mac computers with MS Office installed.

No longer friendly with Mac OS

Mac users will see an annoying feature in Word, this happens as a way of binding to the function shortcuts. For example, with MS Office for Mac, users can use the command combination by typing ' command ' with a letter key, such as ' command + b ' to bold, ' command + x ' to use the cut command , ' command + c ' or ' command + v ' to paste.

But in the Word Web App, users must use the ' control ' key instead of the ' command '. This is probably because Microsoft wants to use the CTRL command to combine key words instead of discrete usage as before.

This may result in Microsoft failing to conquer the Office Web application on Mac OS, giving rights to Google, which focuses on computer users' habits.

In general, in general, Microsoft Office Web Apps is quite good, if improving the above 5 things, this would be a better product, can compete strongly with online services from Google and Zoho.