Microsoft Office Web vs Microsoft Office

Till recently, the only way you could legally use Microsoft Office applications was to buy the software and install it on your desktop or laptop. But that's changing now, with the release of the new Office Web Aps — a free, online version of the Microsoft flagship titles. Office Web, as it is called, includes online editions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. So how does one access the Office Web ? If you have a Windows Live or Hotmail account, you will notice a link to "Office" at the top of the screen after you log in. Otherwise, sign up for an account. The files will live in a Web-based "SkyDrive" tied to the account. Here's how Office Web differ from the offline version of Microsoft Office.

Word

The most fully featured of the apps. You can type, check spelling, set headlines, create tables and insert pictures.

You can't tweak the margins, create columns, or access footnotes or comments, though you can view all these features in a "Reading View" if they've been added in the desktop programme.

Note that unlike the other Web Apps and Google Docs, Word Web App does not automatically save your document as you work, you have to hit the Save button.

Google Docs' word processor is more fully featured, but fancy stuff, including footnotes, doesn't work well when imported into Word.

Excel

You can enter data and formulas in spreadsheets and have them calculated correctly.

You can't adjust the layout of the sheet or create pie charts or other graphics. Oddly, you can't move cells or columns around: You have to cut them out, make space for them somewhere else, and then paste them.

You can't open some spreadsheets that have "comments, shapes or other objects."

PowerPoint

You can edit text and add slides, but you can't adjust graphic elements.

If you have an arrow pointing the wrong way, you can delete it, but you can't make it point the right way. You can create a presentation with pre-formatted boxes and diagrams, but your options are very limited.

The Web App is mostly good for minor edits or last-minute changes.

OneNote

Microsoft's sleeper Office app, designed to help you collect information and notes in one, easily searchable place.

The Web App lets you paste pictures into your notes, but the more useful features of the desktop program, like inserting PDFs and clippings from Web pages, are missing.

The app is supposed to be able to send notes to the desktop program and vice versa, but this didn't work — I got error messages instead.

A Microsoft representative said this may be a symptom of the flood of users trying the Apps this week.

Browser compatibility

If your computer is on the old side, or a low-powered one like a netbook, you'll want to avoid using the Web Apps with Microsoft's own Internet Explorer.

In my test on a computer that's seen four or five summers already, typing in the Word Web App using Internet Explorer 8 was painful.

The text took too long to appear, and the sentence wavered up and down as if I were hammering on a mechanical typewriter. The app simply overloaded the PC's processor, and it was unable to keep pace with the typing.

I didn't have the same problem when using Internet Explorer on a new, faster laptop, nor was it a problem when I used the Firefox browser on the old PC.

Google Inc's Chrome browser did an even better job of keeping the load on the processor light, though an add-on program that makes it easy to send Web documents to the desktop version of the Office program does not work in Chrome.