When I talk to people about how Office Web Apps provide “browser-based viewing and editing” of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files, the thing people immediately get excited about is the “editing” part. That’s understandable: browser-based editing is new for Office, and editing is what makes “information workers” feel productive. Viewing – we’ve been viewing documents since people etched things on stone. Old hat. Boring. And what difference...

Sean Lyndersay, Lead Program Manager on the PowerPoint Web App team, has just put up a post that talks about some of the high level considerations of creating a web-based version of PowerPoint. The post links back to this blog at one point so if you find yourself back here, be careful to avoid getting into an infinite loop. Sean's post is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/powerpoint/archive/2009/07/24/bringing-powerpoint-to-the-web.aspx Nick Simons Program Manager, Office Web Apps

For the first post to the Office Web Apps blog (not counting the 'hello world' post we did on Monday!) I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the tenets that drive our design and engineering. These tenets reflect the fundamentals that we aim to achieve and should provide insight into the tradeoffs we make. Tenet #1: Trustworthy First and foremost we want to build web applications that users can trust. Many elements regarding trust are quite common amongst web applications. For example, most...

In October of 2008, Microsoft publically announced that the next release of Office would include web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Since then, we have been excited about starting this blog. We have been working hard on the Office Web Apps and we look forward to talking about how they work, how they evolved, and what it’s like to translate some of the most used software on the planet to the Web. Today, Microsoft publically revealed more about Office 2010 which gives...