Have you ever needed to work on information in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, but did not have access to those applications? If traveling, or working outside your office at a customer's site, you may only have access to a kiosk or machine with only a browser installed. In those instances, you will be able to view and edit your documents that are stored on a SharePoint 2010 Server.
Microsoft Office Web Apps give users the ability to view, create, and edit documents, presentations, and spreadsheets using a browser when the full Office application is not installed on the computer.
This shows a Word 2010 document being viewed using the Office Web App:
The document in View Mode shows the formatting and layout of the printed document. In View Mode, the Office Web App includes charts and images as well.
When editing a document using the Office Web App, however, formatting is not shown; charts and images are indicated with a placeholder, but are not shown.
The following screenshot shows the Word 2010 Web App in Edit Mode with the abbreviated Ribbon:
The tools for editing in the Office Web Apps are a lighter and scaled-down set compared to those available in the full Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or OneNote clients. In the preceding screenshot, for example, note that there are only four tabs: File, Home, Insert, and View. The full Word 2010 client would have at least eight tabs.
Functionality not available in the Word Web App includes:
All of these would be available in the full Word 2010 client.
In order to use Office Web Apps to view and edit documents, they must be saved to a SharePoint site. Microsoft Office Web Apps are compatible with most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
Microsoft classifies browsers into three levels:
In certain circumstances, Level 2 browsers may deliver a somewhat different user experience depending on the operating system.
For example, a Level 2 browser would not allow you to use the copy and paste commands from the ribbon. Instead, you would need to use the keyboard commands, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.