Outlook.com and Office 365 customers do have access to Microsoft Office Web Apps, it has been this way for almost three years. However Microsoft’s web based offering isn’t at par with Google Docs, which allows multiple users to work on a document simultaneously in real time. The Redmond based outfit will now be making some changes over the next couple of months to bring such functionality for its users, this week it has given us a glimpse of these changes.
Google Docs identifies a document’s co-authors with different cursor colors, Microsoft Office Web Apps will be doing it the exact same way. In fact, the co-author features are quite similar to Google Docs. The freeze pane feature comes over as well, and so does data validation and autofill for Excel Web App. Word Web App gets ability to add comments in edit view, support for header and footer as well as the find and replace feature. Microsoft said that these features will be launched in the next few months. The video posted above contains the demonstration, which begins around 5 minutes and 30 seconds in to the video.