The Windows blog announced on jun 7th that Microsoft Office is available as an online editor (similar to Google Docs) for free! Yay! No more sad faces for those without Microsoft Office installed on their system ;)
Now a better collaborative web experience for the word warriors.
People who live in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland can access Office Live! using ther live/hotmail IDs here.
For the rest of the world, we still get to access Office Live, by clicking here albeit with few features missing, like local language support etc.
I use Office Word extensively on my PC as a lot of my college projects involves typing out reports. There are times when i had to move my documents to different Labs which used different OSes Linux or Mac. Compatibility was always an issue, and guess what, some computers in my lab had no Word editors installed! In such moments, I would access google docs, but now that there's another quality alternative, I decided to give Office Live a try.
Office Live! Comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.
The Office Live is accessible from the above mentioned Links and also from within the SkyDrive space in your live mail. You get to choose if you want to create a new word document, excel spreadsheet or a powerpoint presentation. You can also upload and edit pre-existing documents. All you have to do is uplaod your docs to skydrive and they are instantly accessible via the file option menu. Live! also supports export to local installed version of your Office suite. Convenient!
The interface is very straightforward and looks similar to the office suites on our computers. I experienced no lag even on a 512Kbps broadband connection, it seemed to load just fine.Here is a test document that I typed out to see if felt and worked the same way as the offline suite. And yes, It did! Fluidly!
Here's few screenshots of Office Live powerpoint and excel sheets. They all seem to work good as far as I tried it.
The Office Live supports a whole load of features and yes, there's realtime collaborative editing. This is good news for people who are involved in Co-authoring documents and require realtime updates rather than being locked out during updates. There are few bells and whistles here and there like instant pop up messenger service and plugin web-apps. And for the road warriors, mobile synchronization is supported too!
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