Tech giant Microsoft has made an attempt to catch up to online giant Google by extending its Office suite of services online.
Microsoft Live account or SkyDrive storage account holders can now access final versions of PowerPoint, Word and Excel Office Web Apps for free.
The Web apps also come as part of Microsoft Office 2010, which is due for customer roll out next week.
Existing documents can either be uploaded to Office Web Apps or can be created within the browser. Any uploaded documents can the be accessed from within desktop Office suites without having to first take the document offline.
There have been some omissions to get Office Web Apps online though, such as the online version of PowerPoint not supporting high-performance video editing tools which you get on the desktop version.
On the flip side, there are some inclusions in the online version of Office that you don’t get otherwise. In true web-form, there is now the ability to embed tags into documents and post them straight onto blogs.
The new online offerings will also integrate with Microsoft’s upcoming Hotmail revamp, though exact details still remain cagey.
Office Web Apps is accessible via Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, but noticably not on Google Chrome.
Microsoft currently has roughly 400 million Windows Live users, which isn’t a bad starting base for the new service.
Will you be moving your Word documents online? Leave us a comment and let us know.
3 thoughts on “Microsoft Office Available Free Online”
My favorite is still Google Docs, Zoho and OpenOffice and I can use all these on Ubuntu 10.04.
Never really liked these online apps
Terrific information and facts. Upload files to file hosting web-sites to share them with any person without cost.