In principle, your browser is enough to use Microsoft Office. All known components are also available in web app form within your Office 365 account.
Most users of the various components of Microsoft Office will undoubtedly take a deep breath. Because yes: Office runs well on your Windows PC, and also on a Mac. But under Linux you can forget about it. The mobile apps are nice, but in practice very meager deductions from the full applications. Fortunately, there are also the web apps, which you get with your Office 365 account, among other things.
What makes that option in particular – 365 so – handy is that you can continue to work on a document seamlessly. Save your file online to your cloud drive and you can easily switch from your Windows PC to, for example, a Chromebook to continue working on it. In that case, do not go for the simplified Android app, but log in to your Microsoft account on the web portal. Its address is https://login.microsoftonline.com.
Once logged in, you end up on an overview page with a vertical button bar on the left that takes you quickly to the familiar one Officeparts. On the right you will find a list of recently created and / or edited documents. If you’ve saved something from your Windows system as promised, you can open it here to continue working on it. On any device that has a modern browser on board, that is.
More extensive
In any case, what we see when we open a Word document – to begin with – is that Word’s web app is clearly more comprehensive than that of the Android and iOS / iPadOS apps. Certainly if you click on the small downward-facing roof at the far right of the ribbon that is initially shown in compact view. The web apps are not familiar with this trick. The expanded ribbon not only gives more options, it also immediately gives more of a ‘desktop feeling’. A tip in between: if you have a Chromebook with a touch screen, you can enlarge or shrink the text with a simple spreading movement with two fingers, without having to adjust the browser display size itself, which is handy.
More than mobile apps
What you will also see is that the Word web app clearly has more styles on board than the regular mobile apps. We don’t make that comparison for nothing, because it is fair to say that the web apps simply work more pleasantly and look better finished. What is strange at the same time is that you cannot install these apps on your Chromebook as a progressive web app, or an app that you can add and possibly use offline. You must therefore be online to use the Microsoft web apps. Whether that is really a limitation nowadays with fast mobile internet almost everywhere? We wisely leave that decision to you.
Not perfect yet
In any case, it is interesting to see that Microsoft is still embracing its web apps. At the same time, there also seems to be a kind of fear, because although it now contains a lot of functions, it is not a complete package of functions. It will be more than sufficient for most home users and students and school pupils can also get along with it. Not least because of the cooperation possibilities.
If you type mostly plain text, or if you use one of the other components such as Excel or PowerPoint for more basic applications, then you are also in the right place online. What is a shame is that custom templates – just like in the mobile apps – are also not supported online. Many users have been asking for this for a long time, but it seems unlikely that Microsoft will ever change tack.
Unless they – finally – realize that they will not lose customers by putting (more) complete web apps online. On the contrary, because then Linux users can also participate effortlessly. But perhaps that’s exactly where Microsoft’s reluctance comes from: the fear of Windowscustomers permanently.
Do the math!
Back to the online environment. Besides Word, Excel is also very useful; the web app proves to be widely applicable and suitable for heavy calculations. Think of very heavy jobs on a light Chromebook (read: a copy with a simple CPU and little ram) may be a bit slower than you hoped. But that’s not a shortcoming of the web app, but of the hardware on which it runs. All calculations are performed locally – via the browser. Furthermore, the use of graphs is no problem at all and the whole is surprisingly easy to use. Also think of the processing of measurement data from physics tests and the like, which is always fun.
Present
Also very useful is the web version of PowerPoint (see image above), you will find everything you need to make a decent presentation. Includes animations, Shapes, SmartArt, transition effects, online video and more. The app that also feels like a fish in water is also OneNote. What makes the online apps from Office very practical is the integration with your online storage that you get with your subscription. This means you can access your documents anywhere, anytime, and you don’t even have to install software to quickly play a presentation or show and (or) edit a Word document. If you don’t have inspiration, all kinds of templates are available for both Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Only those damned user templates are therefore not supported as such.
The future?
Is the online version of Office 365 a complete replacement for the desktop software? Certainly not. But it will be for a surprising number of jobs. A lot of functionality in the offline installable Office package for Windows and Mac consists of things that ‘normal’ users rarely or never use.
Furthermore, it clearly has more to offer than, for example, ‘competitor’ Google Docs. Google Docs has the great advantage that you can install it as a progressive web app on a Chromebook. Which means, among other things, that it can also be used offline.
Did you check out Microsoft Office’s web apps a year or so ago and then shrugged them off? Then it is definitely worth taking a look again. The structure of the portal is much more logical, and it all runs a lot better. Keep in mind that the working method today is very different from that of, say, five years ago. Everything takes place much more online and often a word processor is used again in its original form for typing plain text. An article is then uploaded to, for example, a CMS, only then the layout is added.
This is exactly how this article came about!
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