MIcrosoft Releasing New Office Web Apps Preview

If you are a user of Microsoft's Office Web Apps, you might have noticed a little alert asking you if you want to join the preview of the new versions of the Office Web Apps.

Well for the sake of telling you, I went ahead and opted in. Let me go ahead and talk about it.

First off, the new apps have a very metro look. You can see by the look at this document I uploaded about a year and a half ago. Just about every aspect of the interface is Metro like, from the options panel to the left, to the top bar and bottom bars on the top and bottom of the screen.

 Below is the same image, with the settings out.

 You can also opt in and out of the preview, all you have to do is visit this page. A screenshot of the image is below if you want to take a look.

The same metro tastes are in all of the other web apps. The whole new set of web apps will most likely have the same metro tastes of their desktop counterparts in Office 2013. For now, the apps are still in beta. There is some bugs in the code still, as you can see below. My PowerPoint on Verbs had some sound introduced in a few slides, and it could not play automatically like it does in PowerPoint for desktop (or for me, I mostly just use LibreOffice).

Editing documents in the new web apps are pretty simple. You can do the same edits from the browser as the old ones. Although I'm pretty sure some new features are going to be added, the biggest part of this while switch is getting used to this new interface; it might take some time to get used to if you do not use metro a lot or don't know about it very well.

If you do not know what Metro is, it is the new mobile/desktop interface Microsoft is putting into Windows 8. As a result, many Microsoft apps are also being redesigned to incorporate this new interface.

You can submit feedback on these new web apps if you like; you can do that from the file menu. If you have any thoughts, let me know of them in the comments section below.