I Love Microsoft Office

I remember the days of mail merge and advanced content editing with MS Word. Creating Excel spreadsheets was exciting with all the functions, macros and 3-D charts. And those PowerPoint presentations would always wow my corporate collegues when I added the fancy graphics, music and automated slideshow functions. Those were the days.

Now that I'm my own boss I still find that I need or at least miss a little bit of that functionality. If nothing else, I realize that it can be challenging trying to live totally without MS Office. Don't you hate it when you get a file that you can't open because you don't have the software for it? Or when you can't create a document quickly using the familiar functions you've been accustomed to?

Yes there are some wonderful open-source programs out there that I will probably be recommending on a future blog post. But with these programs there is a small, albeit not impossible, learning curve. Plus you'll have to download the software to your computer.

Fortunately, I kept my MSN account after Google stole my heart (see yesterday's post if you missed it.) This is how I found out by accident that Microsoft had a free solution to this problem. Their Office Online suite (www.officeonline.com) is available to anyone with a Microsoft (MSN) account! You can upload Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to this web-based service and edit away. You can also create documents to download and use as you please. Your free account comes with 15G of cloud storage through One-Drive so you don't have to keep the docs on your computer. This means you can access your files from anywhere there is internet access.

Google Docs of course is one of several good alternatives. But if you're a die-hard MS Office fan you will find Office Online feels more like home.

Just thought you should know. :-)