When I talk to customers, they frequently ask, "If I have Office [the desktop apps], then why would I use the Office Web Apps?" It’s a fair question. Office is an extremely powerful and efficient set of productivity tools. I use Office every day. But the Office Web Apps have changed the way I think about content and how I use the Office desktop apps. In the past I have always stored my files locally. Even when documents needed to be stored in a shared location, I kept local versions of my files...

Roxanne Kenison is a writer on Office.com who writes primarily about Office Web Apps and Office Starter. She posted about her own experiences with Excel Web App. The post is over on the Excel 2010 blog . Enjoy! Nick Simons Program Manager, Office Web Apps

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...

We’ve launched a portal on TechNet to help IT professionals get started with the Office Web Apps. This should prove particularly useful for people who are currently trying out the beta . Nick Simons Program Manager, Office Web Apps

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...

Chris Bryant from Office spends 20 minutes showing Excel Web App, PowerPoint Web App and Word Web App in action. The demos focus on the experience in Windows Live but Chris also talks about the other ways that we are delivering Office Web Apps to customers. Enjoy! Nick Simons Program Manager, Office Web Apps

Last Friday three members of the Office Web Apps team paid a visit to a class at the University of Washington here in Seattle. My role was to give a PowerPoint presentation and demo. All I took with me was a netbook. It didn’t have Office installed on it. The purpose of our visit was to launch a field trial where about 30 students will be using the web apps for several weeks and then telling us what they think. The opportunity to engage face-to-face with these students is enormously valuable...

We recently announced a number of additions to Office Web Apps. Many of these additions were a direct result of customer feedback. One of the changes I didn’t mention in the last post was providing some support for indenting the first line of a paragraph in Word Web App. Before the change, pressing the TAB key did nothing or indented the entire paragraph depending on the position of your cursor. With the change pressing the TAB key does this (without the big red arrow)… We made this...

If you’re at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas this week, come see us. Mike Morton, the Group Program Manager of the Office Web Apps team is speaking at 1:15 pm on Tuesday, October 20. The session is called “Understanding the Office Web apps and Office 2010.” If you are looking for more technical information, Franklin Williams will be talking about “Office Web apps: Deployment and Manageability” at 4:30 pm that same day. We are also running a discussion group on Wednesday...

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...