Microsoft Office Web Apps on SkyDrive – View, Edit & Share Documents

Office Web Apps was released to the public via Windows Live Office on June 7, 2010, and Office Live Workspace users are expected to be migrated to Windows Live Office within the next months. Now consumers are able to access Office Web Apps through Windows Live SkyDrive. Office Web Apps are especially useful for people working in teams that want a convenient way to share files with others.

Office Web Apps on SkyDrive are now available to everyone in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland. If you live in the US, UK, Canada, or Ireland, you can head over to office.live.com today to start viewing and editing Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote documents right in your web browser – and share them with your friends. If you don’t live in one of those regions, you can still get access – just go to http://office.live.com/?docsf=1. Note that people you share documents with may also need to visit the link above before they can access the documents you share with them.

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Office Web Apps is a way to share for those who don’t have SharePoint. Users can collaborate without getting locked out of a document when someone else is editing it. You can have access to a document at all times – at work, at home, and while mobile – without e-mailing it to yourself. You can access the documents from browsers anywhere, sharing, and collaborating on documents with anyone across the world. Office Web Apps are part of a significant movement of Microsoft’s productivity suite of products to the cloud.

If you’re working on a group project, you can easily view your documents with Word Web App and start building your presentation with PowerPoint Web App wherever your group chooses to meet. Then, each team member can make additions to the presentation on their own time, without emailing files or dealing with multiple copies of any document.

In order to use Web Apps, go to skydrive.live.com, sign in to SkyDrive using your Windows Live ID, click on Documents folder, add any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files to this folder, or create a new folder. Select a document, and click “View” to view it or “Edit” to edit it. Online editing is currently available for Excel and PowerPoint files only. The ability to edit Word documents online will be available at a later date. Skydrive provides upto 25GB storage.