Microsoft announces Office 2010 web applications

Microsoft has announced plans to put free applications from its forthcoming Office 2010 software on the web.

In a move that pits it against Google’s free office document suite (Google Docs) the software giant said users of its Windows Live services and software such as calendars and instant messaging, will be able to use light-weight versions of many Office applications.

Recently Google and Microsoft have been competing in each other’s dominant area. Last month, Microsoft released a new search engine, Bing, to challenge Google.

And Google hit back by announcing a move into the operating system arena with Chrome OS. This extension of its Chrome web browser is expected to be released next year.

Web based office 2010 applications will include Excel, One Note, Power Point and Word. But the company warned they will have reduced functionality compared to the full installation of Office.

The full version of Office 2010 will include new features such as an image-processing tool and an enhanced cut-and-paste function for Word.

To give more ‘oomph’ to Power Point presentations the company has also included a video-processing tool. Microsoft also plans to include tools to deal with email management in Outlook.

Office 2010 will be released in the first half of next year and can be installed on PCs running Windows XP with service pack 3, Vista, and the yet-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system.