Improvements in the suite, which includes online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, center on four areas: document authoring, touch interface support, collaboration and performance, Microsoft said on Friday.
Office Web Apps, launched about two years ago and used by about 50 million people per month, includes a subset of the functionality of the applications in the full-featured, PC-installed Office suite.
As a cloud-hosted suite, Office Web Apps have been enhanced regularly on the backend by Microsoft, but the set of improvements being tested now are significant, according to a blog post by Mike Morton, group program manager for Office Web Applications at Microsoft.
"This update is by far the most significant we have ever done and we hope others are as excited about the changes as we are," he .
In the area of authoring, Microsoft has made improvements so documents can look more professional by improving editing, layout and formatting capabilities.
Acknowledging the popularity of tablets with touch screens, Microsoft is adjusting the Office Web Apps user interface so that it's more convenient for interaction with hand gestures.
For collaboration, this new version allows users to engage in joint editing in PowerPoint, the only suite application that didn't have this capability previously. Also new is the ability to insert comments in documents and presentations without necessarily being engaged in editing the files. These comments can be replied to as well.
In performance, the new version doesn't slow down its basic operations like typing and formatting as documents get larger. Excel in particular works faster, as do graphic elements in PowerPoint like shapes and drawing tools.
Office Web Apps is comparable to Google Docs in that they are both hosted by their respective vendors and used via browsers, and neither comes close to matching the functionality in the full-featured Office suite.
Those interested in trying out the new version of Office Web Apps can log in to their SkyDrive online storage service account via this special link: http://skydrive.live.com/?officebeta=1.
Another way of testing the new Office Web Apps suite is to participate in the of the new Office 365 suite, which offers full-featured versions of the Office applications delivered and upgraded remotely via the cloud, but ultimately installed locally on users' machines. Office Web Apps is part of the Office 365 beta suite.
The IDG News Service