Office Online and Office Online Server

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 but need 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 continually makes small improvements to Office Online, which is generally more capable than the corresponding on-premises software (Office Online Server). Office Online will receive improvements through 2017. For example, accessibility improvements, as well as Bing integration (for improved spell-checking and improved contextually relevant search), are features in development. Some other functions could also be addressed by additional hosted applications, like Office Sway. (See the illustration “Sway in Office 365“.)