Microsoft Office Live: Gettin' Real

I'm writing this blog using the Web-based version of Microsoft Word. Yes, you read that right; Word for the web, and it works. If you're keeping up with developments in the software, browser, search worlds, you already know that Microsoft and Google are going at it on many fronts nowadays. Both have browsers (MS Internet Explorer and Google Chrome), search engines (Bing and Google), and applications (MS Office and Google Docs). I have to admit that the competition Google is giving Microsoft is probably good for the industry on the whole but it's getting to be a chore keeping up with and evaluating all the different features and developments, and particularly what they mean for our customers. As a provider of technology and technical services, SDFF must keep up, evaluate, and make recommendations, so here's a little background on Office Live and, in particular, Word.

Getting Started

To use it, you need to navigate to office.live.com. If you don't have one, you'll need a Live account. MS logins have their heritage in the legacy Hotmail and Passport, but these days you can think of Live as just another login to web-based resources and services. And what you get with Live is a TON of stuff. The other Microsoft "legacy" that is being left behind, at least for now, is cost; Office for the Web is free.

Office Live Home

The Office Live interface gives you the option to create new Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files. Simply click the button, name the file, and start working. From the home screen you can also view the files you've already created and any files you've shared with others. This is the web, sharing is easy.

Working with Word

Once you create a new Word document, a new interface will open and provide tools that are similar to what you would see in the desktop version. The main menu consists of File, Home, Insert, and View. Obviously this is not the desktop version of Office 2010 but it offers most of the basics you need (in fact, some might argue you need a whole lot less than what the desktop version offers so here is your alternative).

The editing and formatting tools consist of:

• Full cut, copy, paste
• Font control including 20+ of the most common fonts, plus styles like bold, strikethrough, and highlights
• Basis paragraph formatting including numbered lists and bullet points
• Styles
• Spell Check
• Tables
• Pictures, Clip Art, and Hyperlinks

Among the common uses that the online version doesn't offer include:

• Page layout tools such as landscape versus portrait
• Columns
• Table of contents
• Editable styles
• Editing in the Reading or Page view

The good news is, for the more advanced stuff, there is an "Open in Word" button, which I just did and I am now editing the document in Office 2007. When I do a CTRL-S to save, it saves to Skydrive, not to my local disk. There is obviously no “go back and edit in Word Live” button in the desktop version so I close and reopen. But not before changing the page orientation to Landscape. I just repoened the document online and, going to the "View" tab I check out the Reading View and voila, my document is Landscape.

I haven't tried any of the more advanced features like Tables of Contents linked to heading styles yet, but I think this application has a lot of promise. As a sidenote, I've decided to marry my browsers, search defaults, and apps to their developers in order to compare experiences, so when I open IE, for example, it runs the Bing Toolbar and when I open Chrome it loads the Google Toolbar. Microsoft has really upped the ante and has moved much closer to a more complete, web-based work and search experience with Office Live.

Word.