You hear a lot nowadays about Office Web Apps. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Office Web Apps, they are free Web-based versions of Microsoft’s Office Productivity suite. Office Web Apps include Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote.

The great thing about Office Web Apps is that it lets you access, edit, and share your Word, Excel PowerPoint, and OneNote documents online from almost anywhere — coffee shop, airport, mobile phone, etc. Furthermore, Office Web Apps makes it easy to collaborate with others on documents, even if they don’t have Office installed on their computers.

The steps below describe how to find Office Web Apps. These steps assume that you already have a Windows Live ID.

1. Open your browser and go to office.live.com. Office Web Apps support most popular browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.



2. Sign in with your Windows Live ID. (If you don’t have an ID you can sign up for one on this same page.)
3. Click on the Office tab at the top of the screen.



4. From the list that appears, you can open an existing document or create a new one.

To create a new Word document, click the New Word Document option in step 4. From the New Microsoft Word document page, type in a name for the file. To share the file with others, click the Change link beside Share With. Use the slider to share the file with your friends or enter the email addresses of specific individuals. Once you’re done, click Save.

Once you save the document, the Word Web App opens. It looks very similar to Microsoft Word, just fewer options. You can easily open the document in Microsoft Word at any time by clicking the Open in Word button on the Toolbar.

To create documents using one of the other Office Web Apps, simply repeat the steps above only select the appropriate type of Office document that you want to create in step 4.