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What’s new in the Word Web App?

Wouldn’t it be great to have the dependability of Word anytime, anywhere? The Word Web App is an online, free version of Word that extends the Office experience you already know and love to the Web. We’ve been busy making the Word Web App even better, and we’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on. Watch this video and read on to see what’s new in the Word Web App, and be sure to check out the Office 365 technology blog to learn more about online editing and collaboration in all of the Office Web Apps–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

With the new collaboration features in the Word Web App, you can simultaneously edit documents in real-time with friends, family, and colleagues. Now it is easier than ever for everyone working in the document to stay current and see each other’s ideas develop and evolve in front of their eyes. But being able to edit documents at the same time as your colleagues is only half of the story. When many people are simultaneously collaborating it can difficult to follow who’s changing what. To make real-time collaboration simpler, now your peers’ cursor location in the document is marked with small indicators so you can always see where others are working in the document.

Save as you go

Life is full of worries. We’ve brought Auto-Save into the Word Web App because losing your work shouldn’t be one of them. With this update, the Word Web App automatically saves your documents when you make changes, so the next time you’re focusing on your report, remembering to hit save can be the last thing on your mind.

Headers, footers and page numbers

We’ve been listening to your feedback to make sure that we’re building the features that matter the most to you. One of the top requests was for the ability to add headers and footers online, so our engineering teams brought this feature to the Word Web App.

Now it’s easy to insert a header and footer and add page numbers to your document. We’ve also made it simple to place text and page numbers exactly where you want within headers and footers–perfect for adding MLA-style headings into your report.

As we bring more of your favorite Word features to the Web, you also get more flexibility and control when creating documents online. For example, the ability to apply headers and footers to all pages except the first page of your document makes it simple to create clean cover pages without headers and footers.

Table styles

One of the best things about Word desktop is that it makes it simple to make your documents look great. We’ve brought a collection of new features into the Word Web App, so now it’s easier to add polished formatting online, and awesome-looking tables is one of the results.

The table styles feature offers a wide variety of great-looking presets, and the styles automatically inherit your document theme’s color palette, so it’s quick and easy to create a cohesive-looking document. Plus, customizable table style options make it easy to apply complex formatting, such as creating banded columns, without manually tweaking individual table cells.

Find and replace

Find and replace is another feature that we are excited to introduce to the Word Web App. We love this feature because it saves so much work every time we realize we’ve confused centrifugal with centripetal force again.

Page breaks

Last but not least, you can now insert page breaks in the Word Web App, which is perfect for ensuring that your bibliography starts at the top of a page–just like you want it.