Microsoft releases free Office Live review

Without fanfare, Microsoft has released it’s free web version of Office. Hosted on Microsoft Live , all you have to do is login to Windows Live.  Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents can be created without purchasing an Office license.

The Office choice is between Messenger and Photos.  The ribbon bar is much simpler than Office 2007 or 2010 which is a joy, just File, Home, Insert and View. Most of us can’t find the simplest things any more with office.

The product is a response to Google’s free Office apps that Google says are good enough to keep people from upgrading to Office 2010. Hard to say but Office Live works well. I’m composing this blog on it.

The documents are saved out there in the Cloud on something called SkyDrive. I saved the document and low and behold it told me I had 24.99 GB of space left. I didn’t know I had any.  What I couldn’t determine was how to move this document to one of those folders. More experimenting required.

Apparently you can sync your SkyDrive or Cloud storage with a land based computer, either Windows or Mac. It takes a bit of free software to make that happen. This is part of Microsoft’s ambitious plan to put document production and sharing in the cloud. You create documents on one computer and access from any other based on your  Windows Live account.

For some reason, Windows Live does not load on an iPad. It just locks the screen up and goes nowhere.

One thing to remember: the files are not on your hard drive so things might get dicey out there on the cloud called SkyDrive. Save often.

I selected the option to open this document in Microsoft Word and that worked after entering my Passport login.  Microsoft has 360 million users of Windows Live worldwide in 26 languages. Windows Live is the ongoing platform for Hotmail which launched as free email in 1996.
 

There it is, my first document created with Microsoft’s free Office Live. Try it yourself.  I need to work at this a little long to move that test.doc into a folder.