Hotmail and SkyDrive help make Office 2010 great

If you’ve been using the Office Web Apps since our release last week and saw some of the changes to the new Hotmail that we began rolling out this week, you’ll realize why, like everyone here on the Windows Live team, I love the web.

I especially love how web apps like SkyDrive and Hotmail let me work and play anywhere and communicate and share with anyone. But I also love all the great things I can do with apps on my PC, like fusing multiple photos together in Windows Live Photo Gallery, or editing video clips in PowerPoint 2010.

Some would have you believe that you should abandon the apps on your PC to take advantage of the web, that you must live in a world of compromise where you can’t use the best tools for the job, that web-based anything is better than the best PC productivity suite in the world.

The truth is, browser-only services are limited by nature, and just aren’t ready to replace their PC counterparts. This means you’re likely going to use both web and PC software to get your tasks done, inevitably having to waste effort with every task you do. You find yourself downloading a file, finding a place to save it, opening it using a program on your PC, editing it, going back to the website, uploading it again, possibly losing your formatting, and repeating the process every time you want to use the power of your PC. When you type it out like that it really doesn’t seem all that great, does it?

That’s why, with Office 2010available today—and Office on SkyDrive, we've created a suite of software and services that work together for you, both on your PC and in your web browser. No more compromises. You can create great documents like never before.

Windows Live gives you the choice of where you want to work—in the browser or on your PC—and either way, you can access and share your documents anywhere, anytime. Office is now integrated with Hotmail, Messenger, and all the other services that you connect to Windows Live, like Facebook and Gmail.

Let me show you…

Work anywhere

With Office 2010, I can easily create a new document in Word and save it to SkyDrive with just a couple of clicks. If I’m on the road, I can view my document on my phone. Or I can go to any PC or Mac and make quick edits to my document online—even if the computer doesn’t have Office installed. And unlike other services, SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps keep my document’s formatting intact, so I don’t waste time fixing things when I get back to the office.



My Word document in Office 2010





Viewing my Word document in SkyDrive – looks familiar, doesn’t it?



If you’ve used OneNote, you know that Office is good for more than just documents. With OneNote, I can keep track of everything that’s going on in my life. And now that I can synchronize my OneNote notebooks with SkyDrive, my notes are always just a click away. I can jot down every stroke of genius that occurs to me, whether I’m on the web, on another PC—or soon, with Windows Phone 7—on my phone!

Work with others

Earlier I mentioned how you can make awesome documents using Office 2010. But sometimes you need help from your friends to make a document. And when you're done, you want to share your documents with everyone. Well, this used to be really hard, especially when your friend didn't have the same version of Office as you.

With Office on SkyDrive, we've solved that problem. And the best part is, you don't need to change the way you work. Like most people, I like to use email to share documents. SkyDrive works seamlessly with Hotmail, so now I can email up to 10GB of Office documents in a single message, and my friends can view and edit my documents online using Office on the web—no matter what email service they use or what software they have installed.



As long as I send documents using SkyDrive, my friends and I can take advantage of other benefits of working online, like keeping document versions in one place. If we’re working on Excel or OneNote documents, we can even work on the same file at the same time on the web. And if my friends have Office 2010, we can work on Word and PowerPoint files at the same time, too.

Sometimes, I’m not the one who starts projects. Instead my friends will send me attachments the old-fashioned way. But since I use Hotmail, I can easily transform their attachments into online documents in just a few clicks. I don’t have to download the document, find it, open it, re-attach it, and send yet another version that clogs my friend’s inbox. I can edit attachments online without leaving my inbox!



Now you might be saying, “this sounds awesome, but I don’t use Hotmail.”
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Fortunately, we’ve made it easy to bring your Gmail and Yahoo Mail Plus right into Hotmail so even you can take advantage of these great features, too.

Go beyond the inbox

Email is great – but sometimes I want to share stuff with all 5,000 of my friends on Facebook or MySpace. We’ve made it really easy to share with your friends on your favorite social networks and also get updates on their documents – right from office.live.com.

There’s more – a lot more – but we’d love for you to discover some of that on your own. Interested? Try out a free trial of Office 2010 for a limited time. And if you like it, you can buy Office 2010 without leaving your seat! Get started with the Office Web Apps for free at office.live.com.

Jason Moore
Principal Lead Program Manager
Windows Live SkyDrive


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