Microsoft Rushes Out Office Web Apps Preview

CWmike writes "Today Microsoft launched a limited beta test of its Office Web Apps, the company's first public unveiling of its rival for Google's Web applications. Dubbed a 'technical preview' by Microsoft to denote that it's by invitation only, Office Web Apps will be available on the company's Windows Live site via a special 'Documents' tab. 'Tens of thousands have been invited to participate in the Technical Preview,' said a spokeswoman in a reply to questions. An analyst with Directions on Microsoft is quoted: 'This is earlier than I expected. I thought we wouldn't see this until the SharePoint conference at the end of October. Maybe the recent Google moves had some bearing on Microsoft's timing.' The reference was to Google's announcement Tuesday that it will offer online services next year, including Google Web Apps, that are specially designed for US government agencies."

Comments

Re:Yay I can rent my software!

[nmb3000]

One thing I'm sad that has not been fixed since Office 97 is the bullet points.

I really have never had trouble with bullet points in Office. Controlling indentation is usually pretty easy, you just TAB or SHIFT+TAB to move the bullet right or left. If you need to insert a new bullet, just put the cursor at the end of the previous bullet and hit ENTER.

Another important thing to know about bullets if you want to use them effectively is that you can left-click on a bullet to select the bullets in that particular list (each set of bullets is a separate "object" in a document). Right-clicking the selection to bring up a context menu gives you a bunch of options, including some nice ones such as changing the indentation en masse, changing the bullet graphics, and, for numbered lists, either continuing or restarting the numbering sequence.

Obviously YMMV based on what you're doing, but I've never come across any obvious or egregious problems with bullets in Word. They seem to behave the way you would expect. Tables are maybe less robust, but even then, if you know what you're doing (a key component to everything I suppose) they also work pretty well (and more flexibly than Excel in many cases).

This isn't to say I don't have have any gripes with Word (~$obar.doc anyone?). Any person who has used a piece of software for any meaningful amount of time will have legitimate gripes. If not they're either a blind fanboy or in marketing.

Fixed since Office 2003 at least

[mindcorrosive]

- loose indentation for some unclear reason. The bullet will start at the middle of the screen. And how to go back to the correct indentation is some voodoo magic

That's why you can quick indent with Tab and Shift+Tab, although I'm not sure what's this "voodoo" behaviour you seem to imply. You can control tab stops and indentations from the ruler - it's not the best, but works good most of the time.

- won't be able to create a bullet point on the same level of indentation than the previous one, after I made some multi-line text under the bullet or went back from correcting some text at another place in the doc

Oh, you mean, like, when you are writing the list, and you want to include some paragraphs under a bullet, and you press Shift+Enter to break inside the longer text, and then when you press Enter again it reverts back to bulleted list? That has been around for as long as I remember, although I cannot verify since which version exactly.

If I had to complain about Word, I'd more likely mention the lack of a proper citation/bibliography mechanism, or missing font kerning and ligatures, or the confusing ordeal of customizing styles vs. manually specifying section formatting. Word is one of the Microsoft's products I hate with passion - and do not use.

Seriously, when a person gets *that* pissed with a rich text editor, then you should try LaTeX - it's little more than HTML+CSS in principle. An eye opener, no less.