Office Web Apps

That SkyDrive is a highly mature document repository service in the Cloud, is no longer a novelty. In each of the updates, the improvement has been continuous both in quality and quantity (of storage space), and this has led it to become, together with DropBox, one of the main and most important services against competitors with a lot of tradition.

But the service still has an Ace up its sleeve, and it's the Office Web App. A Word, an Excel, a PowerPoint and a OneNotetotally On-Line.

Word, On Line version of the most famous text editor

To start this series of four chapters I am going to focus on the application that I use the most to, for example, carry out this XatakaWindows article, and that it is Word Web App.

Browsing through the directory of my documents on SkyDrive, I select the docx file where I am writing these lines that you are reading. This opens a window where I can perform different SkyDrive options such as commenting, sharing, translating, etc.

But right now what interests me, and what I select, is to edit the document. To do this Skydrive offers me two options, either I open the document directly in a desktop Word or I open it with the Word Web App, online version of the editor Microsoft text.

The first look at the screen that opens gives all the sensation of accessing a normal and familiar Word, with its Ribbon and the commands that I am used to.A deeper look makes it clear to me that is a fairly complete editor to be online, which more than covers my needs as an editor, but lacks the more powerful capabilities that almost no user uses, such as macros, importing and processing of various data sources, or even more advanced capabilities.

For example, one of the things that is missing is being able to insert a page break, or more powerful layouts. But keep in mind that is a light application designed for online editing and that it is, in a simplified way, an excellent web text editor.

Of course it has a pretty good spell checker, and it could be of great help if they add the grammar and syntax module in future versions.

SkyDrive, which makes the difference from the desktop version

But where you get the full power of the Word Web App is when you start to use the added capabilities for use on the SkyDrive platform .

The first thing, which is an essential lifeline, is the ability to carry versioning of documents automatically That is to say , from the File menu -> Information -> Previous versions I access the list of versions that have been stored each time I save the document. So I have permanent access to the entire change history and can download it to my computer or replace the current version with it.

But, what's more, this service becomes critical when I add it to teamwork capabilities, where a group of People simultaneously edit the same document, which SkyDrive also allows me natively. Thus, if a person from the team deletes or modifies the document and it is necessary to recover that content, it is as simple as choosing, copying and/or replacing.

I can retrieve different versions of the document

There is little to tell about the ability to Share, it is a more than well-known system that allows us different levels of access to guests or the general public, and that offers us different means to disseminate our document such as email, twitter or Linkedin.

It also has a special way of publishing, called Embed, which is generating an html code to be embedded in the blog or landing page, where a Word Web App viewer linked to our document will open .

Conclusions

This article was written entirely in Word Web App, like most of the articles I write, it is then proofread in a Word 2013 locally (when I'm in front of my laptop or PC) for grammar and syntactic correction, and finally published in XatakaWindows with the home web editor.

Although it seems strange, the usability and user experience is much more pleasant than in Word 2013 Preview, and the capabilities fully cover all the needs I have to write the article.

In short, it's a Windows 8 WordPad with the capabilities offered by the SkyDrive service, a little gem that I can safely recommend its use.

Oh, and a small detail, it's completely free.