Online applications are a bold new frontier for Microsoft, and the company continues to regularly add new features to its online applications. Its popular Word Web App now offers users the ability to easily view PDF documents.
The company has announced that this feature has been added for people that use SkyDrive, Outlook.com and Office 365. What this means is that PDF files attached to emails or stored on SkyDrive are easily viewable in a browser regardless of device or whether PDF viewing software is installed.
Nick Simons, Office Web Apps Program Manager, made the announcement in a post on the Office blog:
“We’ve just added a new capability to Office Web Apps. On SkyDrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 you can view PDF files using the Word Web App. PDFs attached to mail or stored in SkyDrive are quickly viewable in the browser regardless of device or whether you have PDF viewing software installed.”
It must be noted, however, that this feature creates a completely new file — the original PDF document is not changed in any way.
The software titan mentions that it also tried to add PDF viewing from the Word Web App for SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint Online users, but users encountered some issues with this feature. It has decided to remove PDF viewing from these two services until a fix is deployed.
Microsoft has already outlined its plans to implement several new features to its Office Web Apps family in the coming months, including real time co-authoring abilities inside these online applications.
