Office Web Apps, the online version of the ubiquitous desktop office suite, has been updated with some new features and is now available in more countries, Microsoft announced today. Of particular note is that users can now embed PowerPoint and Excel documents from Office Web Apps into their own websites. The product has received some other useful tweaks, too, including the ability to add charts to spreadsheets in the Excel web app, access to clip art in the PowerPoint app, and the Excel web app now works on mobile browsers.
PowerPoint embedding is pretty easy to do: Create a folder in your SkyDrive account and make sure that it’s set to be “viewable by everyone” in its permissions, then upload a document to to that folder. Hover your mouse cursor over the document and then click More->Share->Embed. Copy the embed code, as shown in the screenshot above, then paste it into your blog post or website. Here’s a quick example of an PowerPoint presentation from WWD guest author Oscar Avellaneda that I embedded via Office Web Apps:
Excel embeds work in a similar way. The really neat thing about documents that have been embedded on a site like this is that any changes that are made to the file in the SkyDrive account will also be reflected in the embedded file.
In addition to the new features, Office Web Apps is now also available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland. Office Web Apps can be accessed via office.live.com. It requires a free Windows Live account.
Let us know what you think of the updates to Office Web Apps below.
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