Office in the Clouds

A version of Office Web Apps is now available to SkyDrive users for free!

If you log into your SkyDrive, you’ll now see a little section informing you that you can create new Office documents with the familiar client logos.

Clicking on one of these takes you to a new page to name your file then clicking save opens up the Office Web App. The Web App gives you some of the capability of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote to create and edit your documents. The look and feel of the Web App is very similar to the Office client so you don’t need to learn how to use a new tool.

Some Office client features are not supported in the Web App (for example, table of contents in Word) but no conversion takes place when you take a file created in the client and open it up in the Web App. The unsupported features remain in the document and you simply see a placeholder informing you what should be there. Then, when you open it up in the client, the features are back. It really is easy to switch from one to the other. The “Save to Web” button in the Office client makes it really simple to start your design experience in the client and then share through the cloud and the Web Apps have a button to edit in the client so you can go back the other way. The document will smoothly move between the two environments giving you a full-fidelity experience.

This means you can use a combination of client and Web App to edit your content without being restricted to the features that are available in both. You can take advantage of the flexibility of a cloud-based editing tool you can use with only an internet browser, while still enjoying the rich and powerful editing experience of the Office client.

Go to https://skydrive.live.com and try it out for free.