Free Office for the Web: A week early, four years late

Depending on how you look at it, Microsoft has rolled out its free online version of its Office suite either one week early — or four years late.

The release is early in that Office Live wasn’t expected to go live until June 15, in sync with the release of Office 2010. But it’s late in that Microsoft rival Google unveiled its free suite of productivity apps back in 2006.

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That delay has given Microsoft’s competitor ample time to secure market share in the productivity-app realm, a space that Microsoft likely would have been able to dominate had it moved faster. After all, Microsoft has a long-standing reputation as a maker of fine desktop productivity apps, a distinction Google — previously just a search engine company, you may recall — did not similarly enjoy four years ago. Better late than never, right?

Microsoft’s new Web-based Office Live suite, which will replace the previously free Microsoft Works, is composed of lightweight Web-based versions of its popular productivity apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Users familiar with Office should have no trouble jumping right in and finding the basic features they need to work. In fact, the clutter-free UI may come as relief to some users.

Remarkably, you don’t need to have a copy of Office on your computer to use the Web suite, nor do you have to be running Windows — or even Internet Explorer. All that’s required is a free Windows Live account.

That’s not to say that users of the desktop-bound Office won’t enjoy advantages. For example, if you create a Word doc in Word Web App, you can open it directly in your desktop version of Word — which has greater functionality — with the click of a mouse.

Further, there are arguable disadvantages to not having Office loaded on your desktop. If you want to save a version of your Word Web App doc to your machine, you have one format to choose from: DOCX. There’s no RTF, HTML, PDF, or TXT options for Microsoft, thank you very much. Google Apps, by comparison, does permit saving to your desktop in those other formats. Similarly, you can only save your Excel Web App document in the XLXS format, while Google supports PDF, CSV, HTML, and so on.

There are ways of transforming your DOCX or XLXS file into another format sans desktop Office, but it’s far less convenient than being able to do via a couple of clicks via “Save as … .” Perhaps Microsoft plans to allow users to save in other formats down the road.

Whatever the case, Microsoft is fortunate to be Microsoft, because its name, reputation, and strength in the market give it a powerful advantage of any other company that would choose to follow Google into the Web productivity app arena.

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