Windows Live Office

If you have a Windows Live Skydrive account then you now also get access to the applications included in Windows Live – Office, or Office Web. Windows Live Office allows you to create and update Microsoft Office documents on the web, without you having to have a copy of Microsoft Office installed on your PC, great for those last minute updates to your Word document or PowerPoint presentation.

What applications are included in Windows Live Office?

Windows Live Office comprises web based versions of:- 

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• OneNote

You can create and save Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents to your SkyDrive and then upload or download them to your PC.

There is even an option to directly open your document using your local copy of Office if you want.

Creating a Word document in Windows Live

When you click on the Word icon you are prompted for a name for your blank document, this saves a copy of your empty Word document to your SkyDrive, in Word 2007 (.docx) format.

Once the empty document has been saved then you are presented with the ‘standard’ Word interface within your web browser. This then allows you to work, pretty much, as you would with a local version of Word on your PC.

Using Word in Windows Live Office

As you can see the Windows Live version of Word looks and acts very similar to a ‘real’ version of Microsoft Word.

The other applications in the Windows Live Office Suite function in a very similar fashion to Word. You can use normal Microsoft functions like ‘cut and paste’, Image insert, spell check and Clip Art.

So if you get sent a Microsoft Office document and don’t have a copy of Office installed you can now open the document and view, update. The one thing that you can’t do directly from the Windows Live version of Word is to print the document.

Windows Live Office, or Office Web

Depending on where you look the suite is referred to as both Office Web and Windows Live Office. I have even seen people referring to the suite as Office Web Applications (OWA), but this just confuses things with the original Microsoft OWA (Outlook Web Access). Personally I think that Office Web will stick as a short form for the suite as its just simpler than Windows Live Office.

You can use any of the Office Web applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for free and store your documents in your Windows Live SkyDrive. At the moment your SkyDrive account gives you 25GB of free online storage.

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