With the beta release of Office 2010 last week I thought I should explore how the suite works with the cloud, obviously there is the obvious example of the Web Apps (until next year we wont really know how good the full suite is) but there are a few other things to note.
Saving (uploading) to the cloud
Within each of the Office 2010 applications there is now the option to save the file directly to the cloud, using the Windows Live SkyDrive service, so users can edit the document online, using the Web Apps, or on another machine by downloading the file. The images below shows how to save your document to the cloud.
As you can see the application lets you choose which folder to save the document too, if its your first time of saving to SkyDrive you will need to sign in in the application first.
After hitting the Save As button the follow dialogue pops up and after clicking Save the file is save to the cloud. Once the file is saved to the cloud by just clicking the save button will update the uploaded file.
The window looks a bit sparse to me, I expect there will be a populated navigation bar on the left when Office 2010 is released.
The document now in the cloud straight from Word 2010.
Editing (downloading) from the cloud
You may think that to edit this document, that I haven’t saved on my PC, I would have to download the document from SkyDrive, thankfully though this isn’t the case.
By accessing the Word Jump List you can view all of your recent documents, including those that haven’t been saved on your PC.
When trying to open a document that has only been saved in the cloud Word will ask you for your username and password, obviously it will only ask for it once if you check the box.
Word will then start downloading your document and then open it just like it was on your PC.
I was expecting the normal Save icon to appear in the Quick Access Toolbar but it seems to only be this new resyncing icon, there is no one else with access to this document. I guess that this is because this is a cloud document.
One thing I have noticed that doesn’t seem to be working correctly is that when clicking Open File Location Word comes back saying it can’t. Not sure if this is a bug or because the Office suite, Web Apps and SkyDrive aren’t yet final. Now I am looking forward to being able to edit my Word documents in the cloud with the release of the Web Apps, when ever that will be.
I am not sure how well used this feature will be as I reckon that Live Mesh will become part of Windows Live Sync and SkyDrive and so people wont need to manually upload their documents to the cloud.
