Redmond, Washington — It might have seemed impossible, but now that 20 million people have tried out Redmond-based Microsoft’s suite of free Office Web Apps since its launch in June, and now PowerPoint and Excel are about to become even more pervasive, besides the company is expanding their reach to seven more countries and adding several new features.
Unleashed in June, Microsoft Office Web Apps, which has already been used by 20 million people, despite some negative reviews, the company has unveiled new feature that will empowers users to embed their PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets in blogs and websites via the PowerPoint and Excel mini Web apps, giving people who visit their sites a new type of window into their documents.
Through the Web apps, PowerPoint presentations and Excel charts can now be embedded on any website. The service gives the ability to make quick edits to Excel, Word, OneNote and PowerPoint documents. Because documents are hosted through Microsoft’s cloud service, embedded Excel worksheets, tables and charts change when the original document is changed, Microsoft said today in a blog post.
The new “insert chart” controls for the Excel Web App. Courtesy of Microsoft.
Since it was initially rolled out in June, the company says that it got more than 25,000 recommendations for how to enhance the service, according to Microsoft senior product manager Evan Lew, in a video accompanying the blog announcement of the new features.
This newly released feature is part of comprehensive set of incremental enhancements that Microsoft is rolling out today for the 3-month-old Web-based versions of the company’s widely used productivity programs. Another major addition is the ability to now insert charts within the Excel Web App. Previously, users could only view charts that were created in th Save e full desktop version of Excel.
The Excel data acts in generally the same way, and Microsoft has now also bundled support for mobile browsers in the Excel Web App, so now you can view Word, PowerPoint, and Excel data right on your smartphone. Other improvements to the Office Web Apps suite include: Insert Clip Art in PowerPoint, Insert Chart in Excel, 20% more PowerPoint themes, support for Printing in Edit Mode in Word, and Open to Desktop Office from SkyDrive.
Below are examples of embedded PowerPoint and Excel documents:
{iframe width=”402″ height=”327″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”}http://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidPowerPointEmbed?p1=1&p2=1&p3=SD20F065AFC1ACDB2E!129&p4={/iframe}
{iframe width=”402″ height=”346″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”}http://r.office.microsoft.com/r/rlidExcelEmbed?su=1702307915631456229&Fi=SD179FD007B18C6FE5!180&AllowInteractivity=False{/iframe}
{iframe width=”425″ height=”300″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”}https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AlL4s9NLfdMQdHprM3lGeEJFTHVzVUJuWGFRbTZJQVE&hl=en&single=true&gid=0&output=html&widget=true{/iframe}
Of course, the concept is not something new. Other similar services such as SlideShare also permit users to embed presentations, and Google offers the ability to embed spreadsheets in web pages from Google Docs, for example. Furthermore, the embedding feature works by creating uploading an Excel or PowerPoint document in Windows Live SkyDrive, which serves as the dashboard and file repository for Office Web Apps, and then retrieving an embed code.
Besides, adding muscle to Microsoft Office Web Apps, the company has also boosted capabilities of Windows companion online service, Windows Live.
Nevertheless, the timing of the upgrade is fortuitous for Microsoft insofar as Oracle announced at its Open World conference this week that its cloud-based Office productivity suite, based on Open Office, is nearing release as well. However, Microsoft is anticipating to stand out from its competitors. The company “worked really hard to make sure that the formatting is preserved,” said Lew.
Previously this functionality was available only on Office.com/webapps, now the company is also expanding its global presence to seven additional countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland, in addition to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland, which already had access to the tools.