Taken from PC World Magazine, July 2010

It should come as no great surprise that the initial foray by Microsoft into Web-based Office applications has produced skeptical shadows of the company’s desktop offerings.  Even if you have great bandwidth, the best apps available on the Web can’t really match the rich functionality and speed of Office’s robust and mature desktop programs.

You can, at least, create new Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents online, via the Office menu item that appears on your Windows Live home page when the apps launch.  And saving items to SkyDrive, the repository in Windows Live, is a straightforward, one-click affair in the Backstage viewof the 2010 apps.

The new version of Hotmail provides Web-app support, as well: Users will be able to open and view Office-format attachments in the browser (avoiding the download step previsouly required to open the files in a desktop app). You can edit Office XML documents in the browser too; Hotmail offers to convert non-XML docs if you try to edit them.  Of course, you’ll still have the desktop option if you want more functionality.

The other benefit of Microsoft’s Web apps is that they don’t break Office formatting.  Whataver changes you make to a file on the Web, you’re unlikely to be surprised by the results when you bring th file to your desktop. Given the formatting issues that often arise with Office docs in rival Web apps, this is no small achievement.

We at ICS predict that the largest users of Microsoft Office Web Apps is home users who really don’t need all the features in the desktop versions, and do not require the programs enough to purchase them.  We are proud of Microsoft for offering a free version of their previously expensive Office suite.