Office Live – Microsoft Office Online and in the Cloud

Microsoft has not been very good at making headlines as of late.  In fact they are so bad at marketing and promoting that I almost completely forgot about the new Office Live Online offered for free.  I decided to reactivate my old hotmail account, jamesroodhouse@hotmail.com, and then give the online office a try.  In short I must admit I am surprised,  Office Live via Skydrive is superior to Google docs and may be superior to zoho.com.  Yes that is right the online functionality of the Microsoft Office suite online is much greater than that offered by Google Docs and probably all other competitors.  Microsoft still has limited some of the functionality on the web versions of Office but no where near so as Google Docs.

How so,  first off importing docs with existing complicated formatting, lets say a resume or a multi-sheet excel spreadsheet imports almost perfectly in this online version of Office (And terribly in Google Docs).  Secondly and most importantly the feature set included in the online version of Office dwarfs that of Google,  if one were a college student or taking a class you could easily type all papers easily and efficiently with this version.  Like Google Docs you get a free 2 gigabyte drive to store your docs on and it is easy to review and share docs.

So if you have a Hotmail account give the new office online a try, it works on macs, pcs, and machines running linux.  To Access the tools login to Windows LIve and click on the Office tab.  (If you are logged into Hotmail look under the section where it says MORE and select Office Live)

Microsoft might be entering this arena late in the game compared to its competitors – but has delivered on a superior product.

Here is screenshot of Word Online Running.