Tune Office Online to your needs

Forget Google Docs: Nik Rawlinson finds that Microsoft's free online Office apps could meet your needs perfectly

- Nik Rawlinson

Microsoft Office has been through a lot of changes since its original release in 1990. One notable milestone was the introduction of the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, but perhaps the most significant moment of evolution came in 2010, with the launch of docs.com - a collaboration with Facebook that allowed users to share documents with friends, discover documents that their friends had uploaded and even edit them collaboratively. It was shortly followed by the full Office Live Workspace service, alongside simple web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Those early online services may not have had a huge immediate impact, but they laid the groundwork for Office 365, which came along in 2013 offering extensive cloud-based sharing and collaboration features.

Fast-forward to the present day and the whole idea of Office has become cloud-centric. Rather than being a suite of individual applications, it's now an all-round service for creating, editing and sharing documents among teams and across all of your devices. The standalone Microsoft Office package has been retired, with no future updates planned after the current Office 2021 release: Office 365 (now rebranded Microsoft 365) has taken centre stage, and the online tools and web versions of the core apps are a key part of the offering.

Office apps for free

What you may not realise is that much of Office's core functionality is available without a Microsoft 365 subscription. You can use the web apps for free by simply signing in with a Microsoft account. Android and iOS editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote are also free to use on devices with screens of 10in and smaller. All of these apps integrate with the OneDrive service, which is free for up to 5GB of document storage and 15GB of email.