Office Web Apps via SkyDrive
Written by Timothy Stewart
If you aren't familiar with SkyDrive, it is a cloud storage solution from Microsoft that allows you to store 25GB of files for free. It also allows you to share these files with people of your choosing. Being able to store files in the cloud is not anything new, however combine this with the power of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and even OneNote and you have a pretty powerful document editing and storage tool. Introducing the Office Web Apps available for free on SkyDrive.
To use the new Office Web Apps, you don't need to install anything, you don't need a Windows PC, and you don't even need to use Internet Explorer. All you need is a Windows Live ID. If you use Hotmail or any Windows Live services you already have access. If you are not sure if you have an account, chances are you probably do since Microsoft pushed this pretty hard with Windows XP and .net passport accounts. Once you get this information all you have to do is go to skydrive.live.com. From here you can access your free online storage, up to 25GB. If you already have a Hotmail or Live email account, all you have to do is log in to your account, then click "more" along the top of the page and you will see SkyDrive in the drop down.
Once you get in you can upload documents or create new ones. It even supports drag and drop from Internet Explorer. Once you have the documents you want to work on, you can edit them within your browser. You can see that after clicking edit you are able to easily edit your document in the familiar Microsoft Office fashion and without installing anything at all! All of the major features work and you can accomplish most of you editing tasks. I will warn you thought that it is not as feature rich as using Microsoft Office on your desktop, however if you are looking for a quick and easy way to edit documents on the go, Office Web Apps are a great solution. Office Web Apps are supported on Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox on Windows/Mac/Linux, and Safari 4 on Mac. Although some of the other browsers are not supported, they should still work.
While uploading your entire document collection may work for some, I find for me it is just a place where I keep some of my personal files I edit on the run. I have too many old documents that I keep mainly for archival purposes and adding these all to SkyDrive doesn't seem like the best place for them. I find Office Web Apps are a great way to keep some of my documents truly portable. I have a few spreadsheets that I just migrated to my SkyDrive that I can easily open and modify from any PC in the world now. You can too. Whether it is for your food journal, billing spreadsheet, budgets, your work order template, or private journal in Word format I recommend checking it out.
(you can see in the last screenshot it works on Linux!)
