Office 2010: Web Apps Review

Office fanatics are closely watching the development of Office 2010 web apps, which is Microsoft Office's answer to GoogleDocs, which allows sharing of a document among multiple users (for those unfamiliar, this is referred to as "online collaboration").

Google Docs, at the time of this article, allows you to see a history of "revisions." This is a useful feature if you have multiple users putting in data into one document. To do the same with the desktop version of Microsoft Office involves either third-party software (such as HyperOffice), or the even Microsoft Sharepoint.

Web Apps however does allow collaboration. More will be said in a later review. But feel free to try it out for yourself.

Link to Web Apps download BETA (as of March 6th, 2010)
Note: There are 2 versions, for School use, and for Organizations.

PCPro has a brilliant and brief review on Microsoft Office 2010 web apps.

Microsoft is a little late to the game of providing online office software applications at competitive pricing (in Google's case, FREE!, can't beat that). Is Office 2010 Web Apps their way of catching up? Probably.

It could also be their way of preventing loss of a customer base that is moving towards the growing trend of document creation and use exclusively online. Why would someone buy Office 2010 if all they need office software for is the very basics in functionality?

Then again, there is always its ever-looming free desktop software counter-part, OpenOffice.org

Leaked! - Free Office software upgrade for some MS faithful?

One of Microsoft's employees coughed up great information too early regarding their Office 2007 user benefits.

Microsoft employee Charles Van Heusen claimed in his now deleted blog post that customers that buy "a qualifying Office 2007 product (with or without a PC) from an authorized reseller between" March 5th & September 30th, 2010, and activates it by Sept. 30th, will get a FREE upgrade to Office 2010!

The free upgrade will be offered in the form of an online download, but it looks like Microsoft will offer "a DVD for a fee." The fee was not specified. However the upgrade request must be made by October 31st, 2010, which does not give users a lot of time to respond.

Since Google cached the deleted post, here is where you can find the information.

PCPro.co.uk has some details on this development.

The question remains how Microsoft will respond to this plan coming into public view too early. Will they perhaps widen the timeline available to customers?

OfficeTutor.info: Word 2007 - Image Captions. Text over Images

Sometimes the default way isn't what you're looking for. Instead, to insert captions in Word 2007 directly on top of the image needing a caption, follow this tutorial. This video shows you how to go about this process. If you want to place text above or below the image itself, please go to this post.