Today, Microsoft is holding an “Open House” for media in New York and one of the things that will be showcased is the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps. Right now, the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps is available to a limited number of invitation-only participants. The Office Web Apps will go into broad public beta later this year and will launch in 2010.

MacBU has been working closely with the Office for Windows and the Windows Live teams to make sure that this exciting new capability is available to Mac users, so today seemed like a logical time to discuss how the new Office Web Apps relate to Mac users.

With this Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps, people have the online ability to view, edit, and create Excel spreadsheets, view and edit PowerPoint presentations, and view and share Word documents with others. This is all done though one of the three browsers supported by the Office Web Apps: Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox.  With these capabilities, the Office Web Apps supplement but don’t replace the full Office suites, either Office for Windows or Office for Mac.

How might a Mac user work with the Office Web Apps?  The short answer is “in basically the same way a Windows user would”.

Nowadays, most people have online access at least some of the time, and many have it almost all of the time.  Such ubiquitous access provides the infrastructure for increased collaboration, but Internet access just by itself doesn’t make that collaboration easy.  I have worked together with many colleagues on many documents and seemingly trivial issues seem to get in the way.  These issues include getting the latest version of the document to each of the collaborators, and even the really trivial issue of making sure that I bring the latest version of the document home with me so that I can work in the evenings and on the weekend.

The Office Web Apps make these issues disappear.  With the Office Web Apps, you store your documents in Windows Live SkyDrive, and using the Office Web Apps you can view, and do simple editing of your documents. If you need to do more complex editing on a Windows PC, you can launch the full Office application and edit your documents in the cloud.

I’ve been using the Office Web Apps from both a Mac and a Windows PC for about a month now.  I have shared documents with colleagues, and I have ‘shared them with myself’, since by storing my documents on Windows Live SkyDrive, I can work on them from almost anywhere on any Mac or PC with an Internet connection.  Here are some figures that show my use of the Office Web Apps from a Mac: 

 
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Editing a PowerPoint presentation stored on Windows Live SkyDrive using PowerPoint Web App from Safari on a Mac.
 

 
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Viewing a Word document stored on Windows Live SkyDrive using Word Web App from Safari on a Mac.


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Editing an Excel spreadsheet stored on Windows Live SkyDrive using Excel Web App from Firefox on a Mac.

 
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Editing an Excel spreadsheet stored on Windows Live SkyDrive using Excel Web App from Safari on a Mac.

So, how do the Office Web Apps work in conjunction with the full Office Apps themselves?  Today, Mac users can view and edit documents stored on Windows Live SkyDrive from the browser only. However, the team is developing ways to work with the Web Apps direct from Office for Mac. We’ll share more when updates are available.

To re-iterate: today, the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps are available to only a limited number of invitation-only participants. The Office Web Apps will go into broad public beta later this year and will launch in 2010.

Also, one tip - especially if you are a ‘font addict’ like me - there is no way the Office Web Apps could access any additional fonts that are on your Mac – either ones you have added to your Mac, or fonts that ship with the Mac but aren’t normally available on Windows.  So, the best thing to do is to use only the fonts in the Windows Office Compatible font collection that Office 2008 for Mac installs on your Mac.  That way, you can be assured that your document will display with the highest level of visual fidelity on either a Windows PC with Office for Windows installed, or in the Office Web Apps on any computer.  To be sure, this same font issue would be encountered by a Windows user who installed additional fonts on their PC, used them in a document, and then shared that document via Windows Live SkyDrive.