A quick look at Microsoft Office Web Apps: not ready for prime time

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a free, trimmed down, web-based version of their Office suite dubbed Office Web Apps on SkyDrive, accessible at office.live.com. While a number of competitors in the form of both web (Google Docs, Zoho docs) and desktop software (Open Office, iWork) exist, Office is still clearly the dominant force for documents and spreadsheets. The release of Office Web Apps indicates that Microsoft may finally be realizing that they will need an online presence to maintain that dominance. Given all that, I decided to take a quick look at the new online versions. I did not come away impressed.

I should mention that I wasn't able to try things out on a Windows machine, so I couldn't take advantage of some of the key functionality (like opening up online documents in the desktop version of Word). I'm confident that the experience would be better using Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, but needing to work on a Windows machine with Office already installed largely defeats the point of web-based software. So with that caveat out of the way, here we go.