How Office Web Apps Work

PC or Mac. Working with the file in the way that best fits your project is another way Office 365 provides just what you need when you need it.

VERSIONS OF OFFICE WEB APPS

If you were using Office 2010 prior to working with Office 365, you might know that Web Apps have been available for both personal and business users of Office 2010 for some time. For personal use, you can work with Office 2010 Web Apps when you use files in your Windows Live SkyDrive account. (Windows Live SkyDrive is a free utility available as part of Windows Live services that enables you to store and share files in a central location online.)

If your company uses Office 2010 Professional Plus, which includes SharePoint Workspace 2010, you can use Office Web Apps through your SharePoint access. In Office 365, Microsoft brought together the best of both worlds, giving businesses from small to enterprise-level, as well as individual team members, access to the familiar Office applications they use every day to finish business-critical tasks.

As you learned in Chapter 3, “Administering an Office 365 Account,” one of the beautiful things about Office 365 is that there’s very little software for you to support. Instead of trying to figure out what an error message means or what you can do to correct it, Microsoft takes care of the technical back end of things by keeping your software up to date, offering a comprehensive help system, and giving you a number of options for getting answers to your questions. Office Web Apps are based on this ease-of-use idea, giving you just what you need to view and edit your Office files by using your favorite web browser. You can start a new file for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote directly from your Home page in Office 365, or you can click Documents in your SharePoint team site to begin a new file with one of the Office Web Apps. (See Figure 8-3.) The file you create appears in your browser window, where you can use a number of tools to add content, format the information, insert elements like tables and pictures, and share the file with others. Although you can do simple edits in Web Apps, they’re designed to be a bit “lighter” than the full Office applications; so for in-depth editing, you can open the file in the application that is stored on your PC or Mac.

FIGURE 8-3 You can click Documents to display Office Web Apps when you’re working in your SharePoint team site.

BETTER FLOW WITH SILVERLIGHT

Silverlight is a free web-browser plug-in available from Microsoft that improves video quality, streamlines performance, and allows for enhanced interactivity in the Internet applications you use. Silverlight is available as a plug-in on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers and is also available for Windows Mobile phones. You don’t have to have the Silverlight plug-in installed to use Office Web Apps, but it does improve performance in the following ways: ■ Word pages and PowerPoint presentations load faster. ■ Text looks clearer when you magnify it. ■ The Find On This Page feature works more accurately. ■ In PowerPoint, animations are smoother and slides scale to the browser window size.

To find out more about Silverlight or install it on your computer, visit www.microsoft.com/silverlight.