Today, Microsoft revealed a number of updates on Office 365 related products, including some new options to share Office 365 Home Premium with others.
The latest Office Web App updates will go live shortly for anyone who signs in at Office.com with a free Microsoft account or a paid Office 365 account. These are significant improvements, enhancing collaborative capabilities and making the free online versions credible alternatives to the paid Office 2013 and Office 365 products.
As ZDNet reports, he most visible improvements in the new Office Web Apps allow anyone to create documents in the three online programs—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—and share them with anyone else for real-time collaboration. Effective with this release, online users of the Word Web App can stop hovering over the Save button. It's gone, as that app now joins its Office-mates in the capability to automatically save changes to files while multiple users work on them simultaneously. Any changes your co-workers make show up in the document virtually instantaneously.
Word also adds the ability to find and replace text in a document, a capability that is sorely missed in the previous Office Web Apps release.
Other features for Excel that have been introduced include the ability to load workbooks that contain Sheet Protection, reorder sheets, drag and drop cells, and rename your workbook.
Business users of Office 365 will now see a new integration of the company's Yammer division. Starting now, all business Office 365 plans come with Yammer Enterprise, and current customers can now get Yammer Enterprise licenses. Also, Office 365 business users won't have to purchase individual new licenses for external users within their external company networks.