Visit the Currys website and attempt to order your Chromebook, and you’ll also be offered a selection of “things you may also need”, including an “upgrade” from Windows 7 Home Starter to Home Premium, and Office Home and Student 2010. Both of which would be absolutely useless on a Chromebook, which doesn’t run Windows and doesn’t even have an optical drive.

Scan further down the page and you’ll also find bundles including Norton 360 security software — which must come as news to Google, which claims you don’t need security software on the malware-proof Chromebooks. Not that you could install Norton 360, anyway.

This is, at best, rank incompetence on behalf of Currys. At worst, a shameful attempt to lull customers into buying extras that they couldn’t possibly use.

(Thanks to PC Pro follower @ct1003 for the tip-off)

Word Web App

This applies to Word documents created in Word 95 or later. Note that the only limitation to file size is SkyDrive’s 50MB limit. Note that, although macros won’t be stripped out and the document will be opened, the macros themselves won’t run.

Excel Web App

The Excel Web App will open workbooks created in Excel 97 or later. The maximum file size is 2MB. As with the Word Web App, macros won’t run, but unlike Word if you attempt to edit the .xlsm file then you’ll be asked to create a copy of the file with the macros removed.

PowerPoint Web App

The PowerPoint Web App will open presentations created in PowerPoint 97 or later. There’s no file size limit other than SkyDrive’s 50MB ceiling, and macros aren’t run.

OneNote Web App

OneNote only supports notebooks created in OneNote 2010. And that’s it.

We’ll start with the Calendar view. The colour coding isn’t new, nor the ability to view two calendars simultaneously, but the Home tab now offers quick access to far more options very quickly. Here are the other tabs:

When it comes to actually being invited to a meeting, you could see something like this:

It’s worth noting those five avatars at the bottom. If I had photos of the five other attendees in Outlook, these would appear there. I can also click on that upwards arrow next to the avatars and see this…

In an organisation with SharePoint implemented it can go far beyond pics. I’d be able to see if someone was online and available to instant message, get their social-networking updates and all sorts of glorious updates. For all those companies that don’t have SharePoint implemented, you’re more likely to see something like this:

So right now I can see what meetings online editor Barry Collins and I share, but that’s about it. Apart from Barry’s photo, which is always good to see, obviously. In theory, however, I should be able to see all the email exchanges we’ve had and what attachments Barry has sent me; Simon Jones talks more about the People Pane (to give this feature its official name) in today’s blog entry.

Below, you can see all the tabs on offer when you’re viewing the Inbox (click on them to make the images larger):

Then we come to the Contacts Ribbon:

And finally, the Tasks Ribbon:

Above is the first screen to meet you when you click File, the Info screen. This makes it much, much easier to change settings than the horrible meandering mess that was Outlook 2007 and predecessors.

The Print view is welcome too. This lets you quickly see if a print-out is going to run over two pages when you only need one, for instance.

Just for completeness, here’s the vision that greets you if you press on Help down the left-hand side. Exciting, I’m sure you’ll agree.

And finally, this is the Options screen. To access it, you click on the Options entry just below Help.

For example, forget pressing <Ctrl+P> and getting that boring old print dialog (shown right for comparison).

Instead, you’ll get something that looks an awful like the below, complete with an automatic print preview and an overview of all the settings. That not only looks nicer, it also makes it far easier to pick up mistakes (printing in portrait when you meant to print in landscape, for instance, or choosing A4 when you wanted A3).

If you’re thinking what PC Pro deputy editor David Fearon was thinking – that by pressing the large Print icon you’ll be shown the usual Print dialog – then fear not, as the job is duly dispatched to your target printer. My only criticism is that Word should know that the HP printer shown here can only print in mono, so surely the print preview should be in mono too?

Here’s a quick run-through of what else you’ll see in the Backstage view:

Info This displays the document’s properties (eg when created, who the author is, metadata such as tags), and also gives quick access to permissions, version management and highlights any data contained in the document that you may not want others to see if you decide to share it.

Recent Nice and simple: all your most recently opened documents. The beta isn’t perfect – sometimes it shows files that I don’t recall opening, and doesn’t show files that I have opened but haven’t modified – but having a nice long list like this certainly helps power users.

New Nothing revolutionary, this displays standard built-in templates and also provides nice previews of templates available online.

Share A one-stop shop for sending documents by email. You can choose to send it as an attachment in its saved format, or send as a PDF. Or, obviously, the much-used (ahem) XPS format. Businesses that have invested, or choose to invest, in SharePoint can also send the document straight to a workspace, while non-business users might wish to share it on Micosoft’s free online workspace, SkyDrive.

The Backstage view is also where you install Add-ins, fiddle with Options and – our final entry here – access the Help and About dialogs.

It’s easy to check a document: click on File in any of those applications, then Info. Clicking “Check for Issues”  and you’ll see a trio of options: Inspect Document (eg for hidden text you may not want others to see), Check Accessibility and Check Compatibility (the features in your document that won’t work with previous versions of Office).

We’re interested in the middle option, and you’d hope to see a message something like this (see the right-hand pane):

With only a certain amount of irony, checking the Accessibility Compatibility of Microsoft’s own reviewer’s guide for Office 2010 threw up 243 errors (eg missing Alt text), 44 warnings (eg repeated blank characters) and 146 tips (eg verifying the order of information in tables).

You then just select your chosen screenshot and it’s inserted painlessly into the open document.

Microsoft Word has long offered artistic effects to add to your headings, but we welcome the new Text Effects as they make them easier to apply and also don’t convert them into some fancy graphical format – which means you can search on the words, just as with any text within your document.

The effects themselves won’t have Adobe Illustrator users fainting in awe, but they’re strong enough to add a bit of impact to newsletters or even the funkier company report. As ever, use sparingly.

In this set of blogs, comprising a number of different articles, we’ve selected our highlights. We’ve only been using the beta for a few days, so no doubt there will be some key aspect that we’ve missed: feel free to let us know if you’d like extra information via the comments below. And if you’d like to try it yourself, note that the became available for download today.

Highlight #1: Backstage view

This is one of those clever tricks, where Microsoft has solved a problem that most of us didn’t even realise existed. Essentially, if you want to make any changes to a file – as opposed to the contents of the file – then Backstage view conveniently bundles them together. That includes printing, changing permissions, emailing, and even altering metadata.

Highlight #2: Recover unsaved items

We’ve all done it: worked on a file for 45 minutes but forgotten to keep on saving along the way, trusting in Autosave instead. And then when we came to close the document, instead of press Yes to save all the changes, we accidentally click no – and lose them all. Fortunately you can now rescue those autosaved versions of files, which Office 2010 keeps as drafts.

Highlight #3: Text effects in Word

Microsoft Word is no stranger to adding exotic effects to words; we’ve all suffered curved text with bevelled edges and drop shadow used in a way that drop shadow simply shouldn’t be used. While the all-new Text effects may well be abused in a similar manner in the future, we’d like to believe that the effects on offer are less open to abuse – and far easier to use.

Highlight #4: Outlook joining the fold

While most people loaded words of praise on Office 2007’s Ribbon interface, it was disappointing that Outlook 2007 was left behind. Now, like the poor relative being welcomed at last into the bosom of its rich extended family (as such), Outlook 2010 rejoins the fold with a Ribbon interface all of its own. It’s much easier to change settings now, for instance, and that comes courtesy once again of the Backstage view.

Highlight #5: Accessibility Checker

If you ever need to produce rich documents filled with pictures, web links and any sort of structure, it makes an awful lot of sense to use this unheralded tool: the Accessibility Checker. Available via the already much-praised Backstage view, this will highlight everything from missing Alt text on pictures to headers that are too long and rambling.

But do the limited apps on offer in the technical preview live up to the promise of those well-polished demos? We find out.

Excel

Excel is by far the most impressive of the applications currently on offer in the technical preview. That’s because it’s one of only two apps where you can currently edit documents online (the other being PowerPoint), and it’s the only one that allows more than one person to edit the document simultaneously.

The Excel Web App sports the same Ribbon interface as the desktop software, although in a very cut-down form. Only the Home and Insert tabs are present, and a good number of the features from those two tabs are omitted. There’s no option to generate a chart from your data, for instance, or insert a pivot table.

Plainly, then, Microsoft doesn’t want people creating complex spreadsheets from the free Web Apps. In fact, it practically admitted as much last week, when Microsoft’s Office Live product manager, Tim Kimber, told us that “if you want to get into [features such as] deep pivot tables, you should be doing it on your desktop PC.”

That’s not to say the Excel Web App doesn’t have the power to cope with complex data. The online app coped impressively with the intricate formulae and conditional formatting used in our Labs feature tables, for example. Changes made to the data were reflected in dependent fields with a delay of only a half-second or so – not quite as instantaneous as the desktop software but certainly no showstopper.

The Excel Web App also dealt elegantly with features that rival Google Spreadsheet simply couldn’t cope with, such as named ranges (shown below) and displaying graphs already embedded in the imported spreadsheet (even though you can’t edit them).

Collaborative editing is equally impressive. Edits made to a spreadsheet are reflected almost instantly on the other person’s screen. There was no warning when two people attempted to edit the same field, and version control is missing, although Microsoft insists the latter will be rolled into the Web Apps eventually.

Also worth noting is the fact that Excel (and indeed PowerPoint) refused to allow edits on documents uploaded in the old Office formats (.xls and .ppt). Instead, the Web Apps demanded that a copy was saved in the new OOXML formats (.xlsx and .pptx) before edits could be made, which is a rather inconvenient faff. Not to mention a rather untactful reminder to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is currently the only other app where it’s possible to create documents from scratch – although why you’d want to using the Spartan feature set on offer at present is anyone’s guess.

There are no default design templates to choose from and only a limited selection of fonts. In fact, you can’t even change the background colour of the slides, which means you’ll have to put up with boring, plain white presentations. We can only presume Microsoft will add to the feature set in later releases, or else the option to start from scratch will be effectively useless.

The PowerPoint Web App is much more adept when handling presentations imported from the desktop software. Editing and inserting new slides into existing presentations is simple, and the online service uses the existing template on new slides, even though only a plain template is available when you’re starting from fresh.

Inserting pictures is more troublesome. Although there are plenty of attractive frames and borders  available for uploaded photos, there is no way of resizing the image. Even relatively rudimentary features such as reveals and transitions are currently off the menu.

The full-screen Slideshow feature works reasonably well, with good clarity and no problem with lag (using Firefox 3.5, at least). All of which means the current offering is best used as an emergency backup for your presentations, should your laptop’s hard disk die on the way to a client’s, rather than anything close to a replacement for PowerPoint itself.

Word and OneNote

Online versions of Word and OneNote will both be available come the full release of Office 2010 next year, but for now they are both beyond any meaningful testing. Word operates in view-only mode, offering nothing more than the Save to Office Live feature that has been available in Word 2007 for over a year. One point worth noting, however, is that Microsoft currently has no plans to offer concurrent editing in Word documents, which will leave the Word Web App at a considerable disadvantage to Google Docs. In fact, collaborative editing is one of the main reasons we at PC Pro use the Google service.

OneNote isn’t working at all in the technical preview.

Conclusion

It’s a mixed start for the Office Web Apps. Excel shows considerable promise, coming the closest we’ve seen yet to an online app replicating the experience of desktop software. Yet, PowerPoint remains acutely crippled, and the other two apps aren’t in any usable state.

Although it’s clearly very early days for these online apps, the obvious fear is that Office Web Apps will only be useful for editing documents created in the desktop software, and of limited use when attempting to create documents from scratch. That may be a sensible move for a company seeking to protect its desktop software revenues, but will disappoint anyone hoping the Web Apps would provide an alternative to the regular Office upgrade cycle. Indeed, if you want to make Web Apps part of your company’s workflow – or even your own – you’ll need to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010.

There’s also much work to do on the sharing facilities if Office Web Apps are to become useful as a business tool. The current SkyDrive sharing is based on public folders: if you want to share a document with, say, a dozen of your colleagues you have to create a folder with the relevant sharing permissions. If you want to share another document with only one or two of those colleagues, you have to create another folder specifically for those workers. Google Docs, on the other hand, provides granular control on a document-by-document basis. Microsoft would do well to borrow a trick or two from its chief rival.