Matthew Weinberger

November 2, 2011

1 Min Read
Microsoft Office 365 Gets Office Web Apps Integration

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The Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity suite is getting enhanced e-mail attachment previews thanks to new integration with Office Web Apps. In other words, when viewing messages with the Exchange Online cloud messaging component of the suite, attached documents will automatically be embedded in Office Web Apps.

As a quick refresher, Office Web Apps is the package of browser-ready versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. And now, with this integration, you can view a document in the browser without any need to open up the desktop client.

Here’s how the official blog entry describes it:

We’re excited to announce an update to OWA in Exchange Online that now integrates the Office Web Apps into the attachment previewing experience for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files! Along with continued PDF support, this means Exchange Online users get high-fidelity previews of Office documents on the web, in exactly the same format they were created.

No doubt, it’s a convenient feature. But the thing that bugs me about it is the thing that’s always bugged me about Microsoft Office 365:

WebReady Document Viewing is perfect for quick document previews and if you need to edit a document you can easily open the file in your desktop Office client from the Office Web App through a single click.

Why do I have to open my desktop client to edit it? Why can’t I do that in the cloud, too? Google Apps lets me. I don’t mean to sound completely entitled, but well, Office 365’s desktop focus strikes again.

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