Will autoshapes and SmartArt be supported in the Office Web Apps?

The viewing experience varies in each of the Office Web Apps. Word Web App and PowerPoint Web Apps both have very high fidelity viewers that will show SmartArt and Shapes (I assume that an autoshape is what is now called a Shape).

I'd be interested to see how the document with an image in the middle of the text would look like. This is something nearly impossible to achieve in HTML but can be authored easily in Word. Can you show us a screenshot of this?

For those of us in the SMB arena, is there anyway to integrate the office online experience?

Borek - I wish I could put a picture in the comment (or perhaps that OneNote Web App had shipped and this whole blog could be a big Notebook? I digress...) But arbitrarily complicated Word and PowerPoint documents look pretty much perfect in the corresponding Web App viewers. In these two cases (where "Hi Fidelity" means "looks exactly like it's supposed to") we render the pages/slides using either Silverlight (if you have it installed) or PNG images.

Roxanne,

You wrote, "And what difference does browser-based viewing make? ... It turns out, it is a big deal."

I heartily agree, and I think you are correct to make the point. I had the privilege of experiencing the web apps during an earlier tech preview, and I was struck by this same point.

It's a surprising point. That is, I don't think most users realize how gratifying it will be to do what the web apps allow you to do.

During the tech preview, I reported my reaction as follows:

"It was very gratifying to see my documents rendered full-fidelity-wise on the screen, in my browser. Very gratifying: no muss, no fuss, and very pleasing to the eye. Do I like seeing my Word docs rendered beautifully within my browser? Yes, it's a thrill. For me, it was as though the distinction between paper and my screen had suddenly gone away. Very nice."

Bill Coan

billcoan@wordsite.com

Hi!

All links between documents, open with Office Word Client.

Is any way to link to other document and it open with web apps. word viewer ?

Help!!

Thanks

Please response to hernan.ramirez@errepar.com

Not MY browser then... **sniff**

That's fine, I'll be alright.

Opera users need a little love too occasionally though, we can't live on acid tests alone.

Flash Player can access the clipboard through a mouse click, can something similar be achieved with Silverlight? It would be a nice "UX upgrade" beside all the other improvements you have mentioned.

Massif, thanks for the comment, sorry that we didn't get your favorite browser into the officially supported list this time.

Once the Web Apps release we'll investigate expanding our supported browser matrix. Give it a try in Opera and let us know if you see issues.

Borek, that's a good thought. It will be interesting to see how Silverlight can improve the UX in areas that don't have consistent support across browsers such as copy/paste.

But will the "Office Web Apps Love Your Web Application"?  Any additional information on the options and approaches that will be available for on-premises hosting of the Office Web Apps for integration within other browser-based line-of-business applications would be extremely helpful to the developer community.  For example, will Sharepoint be required? or will developers be allowed to integrate the Office Web Apps into their own ASP.Net or Silverlight apps with their own central storage solutions?  If so, will there be a license cost attached?

Thanks!

"Opera users need a little love too occasionally though."

And why would they need that? Opera needs to rethink its policies if it wants anyone to support their lackluster browser. Currently, the policies of Opera makes you want to deliberately block it. They seem to think that the best way to compete is by competing in courts rather than competing in the open market. Forcing Microsoft to distribute their piece of junk isn't going to help their market share. They don't seem to notice that Firefox is doing alright without any "help" from the EU...

Can you give us some detail on how the graphical features will work?  SVG? Canvas? VML? Server-side generated graphics?

Thanks.

As web designer and Microsoft stockholder, I find it difficult to understand why Microsoft is unable to support the half dozen popular browsers: Windows - IE7/8, FFox, Opera, Safari, G Chrome; Linux - FFox, Opera; OSX - Safari, FFox Opera.

I design, update and maintain a number of websites and manage to support all the browsers listed above on the three platforms so they validate without errors. This is without any if else code.

It would be encouraging to think that Microsoft, with an undoubtedly larger staff, could do the same. It isn't really that much of a challenge other than understanding what the web is really about and taking notice that, at least for my user base, IE barely has 50% of the market these days.

Lets create sites that have no support for all IE flavours...