Microsoft’s Office Online is a completely free, web-based version of Microsoft Office. For those of you with a Surface tablet that did not come with Office 365 or those of you who just can’t justify the cost of the Microsoft Office Suite on your laptop, desktop or tablet, Office Online is an excellent substitute.
What’s that you say? You don’t have a PC or a PC compatible device? No worries, Office Online works through your browser so you can have access to all of the Microsoft Office Suite of applications with your iMac, iPad, Android tablet, Android phone, and Chromebook without having to download a thing.
Of course you won’t get the entire feature sets included in the full applications, but the features that are included are enough to take care of simple to moderately complex correspondence, worksheets, and presentations. Office Online also includes hundreds of free templates as well, so you don’t need to start from scratch every time you create a flyer, calendar, budget, invoice, school project, photo album, or many other kinds of documents.
What’s the catch you say? Nothing is free? Well the catch is that must have an email address (personal accounts are better than work or school accounts requiring you to use Office 365 which is not free) and you can only run the programs when you are connected to the internet. If you have no internet connection, you will not be able to edit or create documents, spreadsheets, or presentations. You can save files locally (although you will receive 15gb of storage free), but you will only be able to edit or create files if you are connected to the internet.
What then do you get with Office Online? With Office Online you get: Word online, Excel online, PowerPoint online, Calendar, OneDrive (15 GB of cloud storage), OneNote online, and Outlook online.
Office Online runs in your browser and is supported by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So take a look, this just may be the software you’ve wanted to add to your applications that does not require downloading!
For more information, click here: Office Online