Office Online

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

Office Online delivers Microsoft-hosted Web applications that enable viewing and limited editing of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word documents in a browser. They lack many features of the Office suite; for example, users cannot work on documents while offline. However, they can be useful for traveling workers or workers who do not have a dedicated installation of the Office desktop applications to quickly review and make small changes to documents. Office Online also has collaboration features that are not available in the desktop Office suite, such as coauthoring (group editing) in Excel. These features can be useful for group work on Office documents.

Microsoft continuously makes small improvements to Office Online, which is generally more capable than the corresponding on-premises software (Office Web Apps). Improvements rolling out in July 2015 include Word text formatting enhancements (such as autocorrect for capitalization) and a PowerPoint Reading View designed for small screens.

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