Key Features Of Microsoft Office Web Apps

To use Microsoft Office Web Apps, users must sign into http://skydrive.live.com using a Windows Live account.

By default, Office Web Apps opens up to this interface with four default folders: Public, Favorites, Shared Favorites and My Documents. As you can see from the image, the service is ad-based.

Icons can be viewed as lists or by thumbnails.

You can add and categorize users. Users can be added by e-mail address, or in corporate environments with SharePoint, there are integration capabilities with Active Directory.

Although the ability to edit or create a Word App document was unavailable in the technical preview, opening Word docs was accomplished without any latency issues -- even documents filled with high-resolution images, as shown here.

There are some pretty good editing capabilities in the Excel Web App. Users can work with tables, formulas and sorting. However, we did not see a way to insert charts or pivot tables into spreadsheets created in Excel Web App in the technical preview.

You can create new presentations using PowerPoint Web App, but in the technical preview we could not change slide backgrounds, add slide animation or insert video. You can insert Smart Art, image and links and of course open up presentations created in Office installed locally without losing any of the formatting.