Free Microsoft Office, well, sort of...

I hear that as of June 15th Microsoft will offer a free on line version of some of its Microsoft Office products. The idea is that you can access things such as Microsoft Word, or Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint over almost any computer with internet access. Google offers a similar service of storing information on line that they call Google Documents.

I've peeked at Microsoft Office Live. I viewed a document that I saved from another computer, and that worked fine, but was disappointed because I could not edit the document I was viewing without downloading a file onto that second computer, something that I would not want to do. If there is a way to edit the files through my browser without a download, I just don't see how to do it. A second disappointment was seeing a block in the left hand side of my screen that seemed to be there to advertise using the product. I don't care for the use of my screen space, and envision a commercial advertisement there in the near future.

In all fairness, both companies are the ones supplying the bandwidth to run the services, along with supplying space on their servers to store our data. Storage is cheap nowadays, but still can we realistically expect something for nothing? Still, my preference is to work in an environment free of advertisement.

It would be wonderful to be able to run Microsoft Access and Microsoft FrontPage over any computer too, but these thing are currently not available.

The service is still new, so perhaps improvements will be forthcoming.

More info....
Office Live: http://www.officelive.com
Google Documents: http://documents.google.com