Microsoft's announcement of cloud-based Office had sent ripples through the web, bringing the company one step closer to compete head-to-head with Google and other SaaS vendors such as Zoho. This screenshot gallery gives you a first look at the new online offering.
Microsoft confirmed Tuesday that it will offer new versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that can run from within a standard Web browser. The browser-based editing capabilities, which the company plans to show off here at the Professional Developers Conference, are being developed in conjunction with the next version of Office, known as Office 14.
This slide shows how the browser-based product, slated to be released next year in a beta version, will let you view a Word document within Internet Explorer. If you want to make changes, open within the Word application itself or click to edit within the browser.
Credit: Microsoft, captions by CNET News.com's Robert Vamosi
When is Office (and all the wannabees) going to become integrated, allowing Excel-like tables anywhere in a document, with formulae being able to reference any named object in the document. Then there can be many presentation 'views' that slice the information by rule (perhaps based upon tags/styles like HTML's multiple class attributes).
I do a lot of Office programming using the apps as building blocks and it still seems stupid to have such artificial functional boundaries between the different apps. And OLE does not do it!