Microsoft Office web apps now available in the UK

By , Published June 8, 2010

Microsoft have finally launched their free online Office Suite (termed ‘office web app’) to UK users as part of SkyDrive – Microsoft’s cloud storage platform. We’ve all been sent at least one document file created in Microsoft office that ends up looking mangled when importing into OpenOffice or Google Docs – for those times this free web app service could finally relieve the burden of having to wine a full Microsoft Office install.

Skydrive
Don’t let the word ‘Microsoft’ put you off signing up to Skydrive over other web storage solutions. Skydrive provides users with a generous 25GB of free storage as well as access to the four main Office Web Apps – Word, Excel, Powerpoint &, er, OneNote. All should, in theory, work fine from any browser on any platform.

The office suite itself is immensely pared down compared to its desktop sibling. Some might argue that for Joe Casual the features offered are those that are needed. There is little outside of convenience (being able to edit skydrive-saved documents directly in the respective OWA.) and the allure of guaranteed Microsoft Document format compatibility to sway die-hard GDoc users, and for those not already making use of Skydrive storage, even less.

For better or worse, Word Web App has access to a vast Clipart library…

The new Office Web Apps can be accessed from the Skydrive site @ skydrive.live.com.

Like it? Web app it!
If you think you’re going to use Skydrive web apps often you may wish to create web-app shortcuts to the respective applications using either Prism in Firefox or ‘Create Application Shortcut‘ in Chrome/ium and linking those shortcuts to the relevant menus.

Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

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  • Anonymous

    Meh, nothing GDoc doesn’t have (minus the 25GB of storage) although its a generous giving that much space they can easily afford it, and its most likely a way to put a good word in for microsoft. Otherwise i don’t see the point of web apps for the most part :/

    • ActionParsnip

      Netbooks with limited storage thrive on web apps

      • http://olympusdigitalpen.blogspot.com/ dr. watson

        My netbook does extremely well with GTK apps, in fact the only area which slows it down is a Flash or Java heavy website, so as much I love the Cloud, it needs quite a bit of improving.

        As far as storage is concerned, I ditched my undersized SSD recently for a traditional hard drive (WD Scorpio Blue) and couldn’t be happier. SSDs have too much overhead (firmware problems, TRIM, maintenance, bricking, etc) and in my honest opinion the performance was only marginally better in day-to-day use.

        • Anonymous

          Thank you for stopping me making a wrong decision.

  • http://blastfromthepast.se/ Tommy Brunn

    Question! Does the MS Office web version allow you to save local copies of your documents in PDF format?

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      No. (surprise) you can only download documents in the primary file extension. So for Word – it’s .docx and nowt else.

      • http://orkutcidio.deliriocoletivo.org Peterson Espaçoporto

        So it’s still rubbish.

        (Not that I would use it anyway)

      • http://blastfromthepast.se/ Tommy Brunn

        Ah, too bad. That would have actually made it useful.

      • Anders Etzerodt

        Haven’t had the opportunity to try it in the MSO Web version, but can’t you just simply choose to print the file and then “print” it to .pdf?
        That works for every web page in both firefox and chrome for me.

  • Will

    cool………. too bad googles Docs already does all of this .. and lets me access it from a mail address i actually use. The 25 gig of stoarge is cool i guess .. although i havent really looked at it.. Can i use it like a dropbox? or do i have to individually load up files?

    Also why does this say in the UK, I’m in the US and it looks like it works for me.. enless its because my windows email address is a .edu address.

    Now if this web app lets me access a doc with other people in real time and edit it…. and this 25gigs of storage can be synced automatically to a folder on my computer ….. then yeah maybe ill think about loging into my .edu instead of my gmail account .. but google has so much to offer and there just not enough reason to switch back.

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      It’s been available in the US for a few months, but was only today rolled out for UK users and a few other European countries.

      SkyDrive will be more like Dropbox with the release of Windows Live Essentials later this year – it will have a sync application. Alas, it won’t be available for Linux users though ;)

      • Anonymous

        Wait… so Microsoft is playing catch up to Canonical’s UbuntuOne? ;)

  • http://robjn.myopenid.com/ RobJN

    I take it that there is no VBA. Stupid question but that is one of the things I can’t get to work in Office 2007 under wine. Means I still have to dual boot.

    Does anyone have any ideas on that? (and no, OOo, although it has some form of VBA, is simply not up to the level required)

  • http://cldx.blogspot.com/ Joern Konopka

    25 Gigs sound awesome but the Win-only restrictions just turn me off. Im tired of things along the lines of “We want people to collaborate, but only with OUR software please.”.

    • nanda

      but its ok for ubuntu one to only work on linux? I don’t think we can take the high road in this case

      • http://orkutcidio.deliriocoletivo.org Peterson Espaçoporto

        I heard they’re working on a Windows version.

        But hey, they don’t even have a KDE one. That pisses me off.

  • http://el-bhm.myopenid.com/ el-bhm

    Whatever. PDFs are so common among people I know, I don’t even care for other formats.

  • http://twitter.com/AdeIsAtwit Ade Newton

    It’s a shame there’s still no way to email your docs from your hotmail account, either from having an email to option with skydrive, or being able to attach a skydrive doc from within hotmail. Until they sort that out then I’ll still be recommending Google docs to even Windows users.

  • http://twitter.com/WolfHook Paul

    Typical Microsoft, years behind the curve.

    • Anonymous

      Actually they started doing this in 2005 before Google, but yes, they “finished” it later than Google. But Google won’t kill the Office suite for years to come anyway, no with programs like InfoPath, etc. (Less users than Word though obviously). And what about the Courier? They _can_ innovate, but they do tend to be behind these days, except for desktop Office obviously.

  • Anonymous

    Cool.And this is related to ubuntu…how exactly?

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      Various applications, services or tips featured on here have only simple tangential links back to Ubuntu; grass wallpapers are related to Ubuntu how? Lightworks video editor going open-source is related to Ubuntu how? etc.

      We’re an Ubuntu user site – and many Ubuntu users, as is addressed in the first paragraph or so, may need to access & edit .docx (or other Microsoft Office files) that aren’t able to be appropriately read via OpenOffice – the launch of this allows them to do just that without having to install Microsoft Office via wine.

      • Anonymous

        hmm for once i begin to like microsoft

        i tried it and works on firefox in ubuntu, now i dont need to install the dreaded office in wine yay!

        thanks microsoft ! (for now, but still gotta keep an eye on them oO)

        ps. am in latinamerica, working fine here :)
        thanks d0od for the news

        • Anonymous

          I’m sure this is great and OneNote is awesome (not sure what you mean by “er, OneNote”?) but any of these services are not for savvy users. Using something out of a browser and privacy reasons are enough to use install it locally. Yes this is legal (maybe not for Linux users under MSFT’s terms) but it is not private at all, especially for GOOG’s online suite. (They data mine you more than MSFT.) You get ease of use of accessing it offline as well. (To ease installation you may be able to install it with VMWare ThinApp and copy to Ubuntu and run in WINE.)
          However d0od, you get props from me for not being a Google fanboy, you’re welcome to like Google services as I know you use at least some of them.

          • http://rossmasters.myopenid.com/ Ross

            I’m guessing by “er OneNote” he means he’s never had to use it – as a Uni student I can say it’s invaluable – haven’t found a good alternative yet (however it means I need to boot into Win7, will have to try this version out).

          • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

            Less that I haven’t used it but more that the majority of users who will use this service probably will never have heard it.

          • Anonymous

            Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, and I don’t know, I’ve heard MS do a bunch of shifty stuff with privacy, like the Research add-on not asking consent for collecting data in IE (not the same as the Customer Experience program).

            I just found out that you can run an application in Seamless Mode in Virtual Box, so a Windows application will just relatively fit in the taskbar/dock/hybrid-of-the-two, might be bad for RAM though. I’m still more interested in OneNote, but there are other’s that are cross-platform, like Evernote [See section below]. KDE PIM might also do the trick, and I really like the idea of KDE Basket Notepads, but it needs developers. (I am a bit more of a GNOME dude but yeah they’re too conservative.) I haven’t started using ON because I don’t want to be locked in, so I’m investigating thinstalling it and running it in WINE or streaming it over a network somehow and if something comes along that does basically the same thing, maybe I’ll just find out how to write a script to PDF the whole lot and reverse engineer the PDFs (or XPS, since it’s just an XML zip thing – yeah that’s MS too…).

            Ross, EverNote is less hierarchical, it’s more one type of thing per page as far as I know, Linux version too (said to be not that great though – there was a Lifehacker article about it a while back – v3.0 was compared with v2.?? by commenters). There’s even a portable install, it exists for Windows at least, but it might make it easier to run in WINE if necessary. Anyone, would thinstalling/a portable install make a program easier to run?

  • http://wakoopa.com/xfact XFACT

    Finally we can use something from Microsoft which is very much useful! Told ya don’t hate one company always XP

    Stupid thing is .docx! Why? :O

  • Gfds

    I don’t care…

    (Lives in the UK)

  • http://moondowner.wordpress.com Martin Spa.

    Why on earth do you need this when you have Google Docs :)

  • Anonymous

    Some people who don’t quite like OpenOffice, for whatever reason, will like this. The storage is certainly very appealing.

    Many might find using Microsoft’s free hard drive space liberally from Ubuntu very satisfying.

  • http://www.expatsinksa.com/ Bilal Akhtar

    Still preferring Google Docs over this M$ product…………………………

  • Juan Montano

    I am in Mexico and I tried to create a document in Chromium and it didn’t work. I didn’t had the options in the Documents option.
    Then I change to Firefox and I saw the options to create Word/Excel/PowerPoint but when I clicked I received an error saying that the element was not present.
    I think I will stay with Google Docs.

  • irony

    I was quite excited about this so exported a spreadsheet document from openoffice as .xlsx format only to find that it would not open in Skydrive because I don’t have Microsoft office installed. I then tried a simply copy function on Skydrive’s excel, i.e. I highlighted a cell and attempted to grab its corner and copy down, except that it has no corner to grab… All in all Skydrive is very limited and it certainly isn’t free as it requires you to purchase Microsoft office.

  • http://twitter.com/ernsm ernesto

    i cant start the apps via ubuntu. not in chrome or firefox