Office Web Apps: More to Love, Coming to Your Favorite Devices

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations

The Office team recently shared plans for some of the upcoming investments Microsoft is making to deliver a great Office experience on the Web, including broad cross-platform device support.

When Microsoft launched Office Web Apps in 2010, the apps were companions to the Office desktop experience that enabled lightweight, on-the-go content creation and review. Since then, browser technologies and speeds have advanced and development infrastructure has matured, making the Web a better productivity platform.

With these improvements, Microsoft’s goal is to deliver Office Web Apps that people can rely on to create polished Office documents from start to finish, all from the Web and on virtually any device.

Office Web Apps are a key connection point between Office and the expanding array of devices our customers use. The full power of Office Web Apps is already available for Windows 8 tablets and iPads and we will be extending the same capabilities to Android tablets via mobile Chrome browser support.

Another planned enhancement is real time co-authoring in the Office Web Apps, meaning that all file authors will automatically see edits from others as they happen without needing to refresh. You can get a glimpse of this feature today in the PowerPoint Web App, where users can now see each other's changes almost immediately, but in the next few months PowerPoint Web App co-authoring will get even faster and the feature will be added in the other Office Web Apps.

For more on Office Web Apps’ cross-platform support, as well as planned improvements to overall user experience and collaboration features, please see the Office 365 blog.