Free: Office Live Web Apps

In all of the news about the upcoming Wave 4 update for Windows Live Essentials (Messenger, Skydrive, Mail etc) a little thing called Office Live Web Apps appeared, and now everyone can use it for free.

There are some pretty cool things here, not only do you get online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for free, but you can also collaborate on the documents. I can see a bunch of friends collaborating on a OneNote notebook during  a lecture, or working on a report using multiple machines, all at the same time – and no need for anyone to collate at the end.

These apps are available for free, and to access them, you just need to visit http://skydrive.live.com and login with your Windows Live ID. (You already have one if you use Hotmail and/or Messenger)

Or alternatively you can visit http://office.live.com and get the same experience. Skydrive binds all of these services together, and still keeps the 25GB of space that you can use to store not only documents, but any other file you want.

From there you can create a new document and share it, or upload an existing document you have already started working on.

There is no need for any special plugin, and it should work in all of the major browsers.