While Microsoft's Office 2010 is now available to download for Software Assurance licensing customers, one part of the suite not yet officially available is the Office Web Apps (OWA), due on May 12.

So far, only a technical preview of the Web Apps has been widely seen, and this did not allow anything other than viewing in Word, while OneNote was absent entirely, but I have now been allowed a brief hands-on with the final versions, courtesy of Microsoft.

OWA consists of versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that can be accessed via a browser, but are being spun by Microsoft as complementary to the full Office 2010, rather than replacing it.

This can be seen by the way in which Microsoft is providing access to the Web Apps; business customers deploy them via Sharepoint, and the rights to use them come only with the volume licensed editions of the Office 2010 Office Standard and Office Professional Plus.

However, customers can choose to deploy using the free Sharepoint Foundation (formerly Windows Sharepoint Services) on a Windows server, or the full Sharepoint Server 2010, or even via the Sharepoint Online hosted service.

Consumers will be able to access the applications from June via Windows Live, assuming they have a Windows Live ID.

In Microsoft's vision, the Web Apps will be used to quickly view documents while searching for the required one on a Sharepoint portal, or provide an emergency fallback if the full-blown Office suite is not available, such as when a worker is at an airport web terminal, for example.

For this reason, the Office Web Apps have limited functionality compared with the full client versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

For example, the Word Web App doesn't let you edit or insert tables - these simply show as placeholders if you open a document containing some.

The Excel Web App also doesn't let you create charts, but if you change any of the cell values, existing charts will reflect the update.

However, Microsoft said that for the most part, documents will display in the Web Apps exactly as they would look in Office 2010, and this seemed to be the case with the test documents I used here.

PowerPoint files, for example, seemed to display in the browser exactly as you would expect them to in the full PowerPoint client.

Microsoft also claimed that documents can be 'round tripped' between users editing using Office 2010 and the Web Apps, without losing any formatting.

Collaborative editing is also supported in some applications; Spreadsheets can be opened by more than one person using the Excel Web App, while OneNote documents can be edited by several users using the browser or rich client.

As the screenshots show, the applications have been designed to closely resemble their desktop counterparts so they will be familiar to users, and they consequently look much slicker than other web-based applications such as Google Docs.

However, Google's apps mostly have greater functionality than their Microsoft counterparts, which largely have just basic editing and formatting functions.

While the Web Apps only support Microsoft's Office Open XML file formats, you can view files created using Office 2003 or earlier, and attempting to open one will ask you if you want to convert it to the newer format.

The good news is that the apps are cross-platform, and have been designed to work in other browsers such as Firefox, or even Apple's Safari, according to Microsoft.

Overall, the Office Web Apps do seem to be best regarded as an extension of Office 2010 rather than a replacement for it. Consumers seeking basic tools to create and view documents may be satisfied with these capabilities once the Web Apps become available in Windows Live, but business users should expect to still purchase the full Office suite.

30 Apr 2010