Microsoft has now struck back by releasing free online versions of its Office Suite and giving the users an alternative to Google Docs.

Called Office Web Apps, this suite is a cut down version of the desktop applications and allows for document viewing, sharing and light editing.

The consumer version of the tools are free and store the documents on Live SkyDrive. The corporate versions can get self hosted versions of the applications using Sharepoint.

Being online applications means that the applications will work regardless of the operating system and have been tested in Windows, Mac’s and Linux based machines through various internet browsers.

If you have Office 2010 installed, then Office Web Apps takes advantage of offline and online editing and can present a richer experience for users.

Office Web Apps are also supported via mobile browsers and allows the user to view documents saved onto their Live SkyDrive account directly on their mobiles.

Read below on how to use Office Web Apps.

Using Office Web Apps

In order to use this facility, you can sign up to your Windows Live account, or navigate to http://office.live.com.

Once you have signed on, you will be presented with a new “live” page similar to below:

The page will list all recent documents created using Office Web Apps as well as giving an option on the right to create a new document.

The interface is uncluttered and is user friendly. Hovering over an existing document displays a menu that allows for additional options:

These menus allow the user to share a document, view version history, download a local copy, etc.

When creating a new document, the first thing Web Apps asks for is a file name

Because this is a web application, the speed at which the application opens is dependent on your internet connection. It can take a bit of time to open the applications themselves.

Word

Any existing user of Microsoft Word will be familiar with the lighter online version of the application. It has a subset of functionality, but enough common functionality to be a good alternative at a pinch.

Opening up the document locally directly from this interface won’t work unless you are running Office 2010. Note: 2007 does not meet the requirements.

Excel

Again, a familiar interface to anyone who has used a spreadsheet before.

The one thing I couldn’t locate in here was a charting option. Which is a big omission. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough, but given the limited functionality, I couldn’t seem to see it anywhere.

PowerPoint

This allows you to create quick presentation slides or brochures. A lightweight again compared to the full version, but it comes with a variety of themes that can make a good looking presentation quickly and easily.

Because this can be graphically heavy, it can get cumbersome to work with online.

OneNote

OneNote is Office’s version of a catch all information store for storing ideas, plans, etc. It can contain multiple “notebooks” that can have pages that can hold all manner of information.

The online version is similar to the full version and while it hasn’t got the place notes and clips everywhere, it has enough to allow the user to jot quick notes down and store in an organised manner.

Conclusion

Working with the online version can present a bit of an issue if you have been using the full versions and are used to having functionality that suddenly is not there.

However, the subset of functions available are usually enough to use on demand.

I don’t believe this suite will replace the desktop versions (I don’t believe that is the aim). But if required, this can be a good half way house.

To enable full integration, you will need to use Office 2010 which supports opening documents from the web.

Related Posts

• Live SkyDrive – Mounting as a Network Drive via Gladinet
• Live SkyDrive – Saving files larger than 50 megs
• Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite

Version 14.0.8117.416 is part of the new Wave 3 suite of the Live Essentials package.

Most Windows platforms are supported, however the installer still complains when trying to run via Windows 2003 Server.

I’ve extracted the MSI package for Writer and placed it on my Live SkyDrive in case you need to install it for Windows Server 2003. Read below for instructions and download links.

You can download the MSI here: http://bit.ly/Writer14_0_8117_416 

A few notes:

If you already have an older version of Writer installed, you will need to uninstall it first. To be safe, back up your Plugins folder (normally found in c:\program files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins) and store in a safe place before uninstalling.

I uninstalled Writer using the Add/Remove programs applet in my control panel.

Once uninstalled, you can then right click on my MSI and select Install. It should install Writer automatically.

When I installed it, it didn’t lose my blog settings or my plug ins. Be prepared to set up everything again should it be required.

If you have any issues, feel free to place a comment and I’ll try and assist as much as possible.

Would appreciate a tweet/share/comment if you found the above useful :)

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Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

To install SkyDrive Explorer, go to http://www.skydriveexplorer.com and click on the Free Download menu.

Step 1

Download the setup via the download link and run through the steps to install the application:

When you hit Finish, the installer will close. At this point in time, there is no “executable file” that you need to run to start the application itself.

Step 2

Open up your “My Computer” and you’ll see the SkyDrive Explorer under the list of your “Other” drives:

Step 3

The first time you double-click on the icon, the following dialog box will show:

Put in your Live user details and hit Sign In

Step 4

Once authorized, your windows explorer will now show the contents of your SkyDrive account:

And that is pretty much it! Again, you can treat this just like any other windows folder and/or drive on your computer. The advantage of this drive is that it is stored on the cloud and so available wherever you go.

Warning

SkyDrive Explorer communicates with your SkyDrive account by HTML Web page parsing, which means that should Windows Live decide to change their content format, this application may not work any more. However, I’m sure that the SkyDrive Explorer folks will update regularly should any of their functionality gets disabled due to Live SkyDrive changes.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

Step 1

Open up Notepad, and select File..Open. In the resulting window, navigate to \Windows\System32\Drivers\etc

Ensure that Files of Type is set to “All Files”

Step 2

Select the file called “hosts” and click on Open. This will open the hosts file and it should look something similar to below:

Step 3

You may have more than one line in the list of IP addresses. Add this line to the list:

127.0.0.1      rad.msn.com

Ensure there is a TAB between the IP Address and the URL.

Step 4

Save the file and close it.

Step 5

Restart Windows Live Messenger and check to ensure that the images are now gone. The ad’s should now be replaced by a blank white space. The space will still be there, but at least, now we no longer have that annoying flash advert that pops up and kills what would be an otherwise love user experience :)

Hope that helps someone out there :)

When a blog is set up first in Windows Live Writer, the theme and style sheet is automatically downloaded from the blog to provide this preview functionality.

If the theme or style sheet is changed, you will need to manually refresh in Windows Live Writer to get the latest version to ensure that the preview remains accurate. Its a few simple steps to do this…

Open Windows Live Writer and select your blog from the Blogs menu. If you haven’t configured Windows Live Writer yet, feel free to go here to for a refresher: How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs.

Once you have selected the blog you wish to refresh, select Blogs..Edit Blog Settings from the menu bar:

Click on the Editing menu and you’ll see a button to Refresh Theme. Click that. A small dialog box will appear that shows the progress:

Once this is complete, the theme should be refreshed and clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer should show the latest version of your website with your new article in it.

Note: The application may ask you if it can post a dummy article to your blog to allow it to retrieve the theme correctly. This post is deleted immediately afterwards, so feel free to allow it to do so.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

Step 1

NOTE: This may not be required for blogs hosted on wordpress.com. This is typically only required for self-hosted WordPress blogs. In this case, go to Step 2.

Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard, and under Settings.. Writing, ensure that the following item is checked:

Turning on XML-RPC will allow Windows Live Writer to connect to your WordPress blog. Scroll down and hit “Save Changes” to commit the changes.

Step 2

Start Windows Live Writer, go to the Blogs menu and click on “Add Blog Account…”

Choose “Other Blog Service” and hit Next

Step 3

Enter your web address of your blog, your admin username and password and hit next. If you like you can select “Remember my password”

Step 4

Windows Live Writer will now connect to the blog, analyze and set up the application.

During the analysis process, you may get a dialog box as below:

Hit Yes to this as this will ensure that you can get an accurate preview of your posts in Windows Live Writer.

Once it has completed setting up the application, it will display the following information:

Choose a name that can identify your blog and hit Finish.

Conclusion

That should be it. You can connect to several blogs at the same time in Windows Live Writer. To switch from one blog to another, its as simple as selecting the relevant blog from the Blogs menu in the menu bar.

I’ll set up some more posts later on how to get the best use out of Windows Live Writer. If there is anything in particular that you wish to know, please leave a comment and let us know :)

Relevant Links

• Download Windows Live Writer page: http://download.live.com/writer
• Installing Windows Live Writer on Windows Server 2003

At that time, Gladinet was still a Beta Program. Recently, they released Version 1 and there has been some significant changes to the instructions. I’ve now updated the post to properly reflect these changes.

I’m now using the free edition of Gladinet to connect to my SkyDrive, Google Apps and Google Picasa albums all via My Computer

You can find the article here: Set Up Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet

Hope this helps everyone!

It is API based and there are several applications that use this API that would be useful to both webmasters as well as developers in addition to IE8 users.

Today, we’ll look at 4 ways to use Microsoft Translation services:

1. Translation Accelerator for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0
2. Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger
3. Windows Live Toolbar Translator Button
4. Webmaster uses for Microsoft Translator (via Widgets)

1. Translation Accelerator for IE8

With the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0, there is a built in accelerator to translate languages on the fly. First brought out with IE8.0 Beta 2, it allows the user to highlight any selected text and translate to various languages immediately.

It is as easy as highlighting a section of text in IE8, and clicking on the little blue arrow that brings up a context window. At this point you have two options:

1. If you hover your mouse over “Translate with Live Search”, another window will pop up with choices to translate from and to different languages.

2. Clicking on the “Translate with Live Search” will actually take you to the microsofttranslator.com site (opens in a new window) with the text pasted in and ready for you to translate.

That’s excellent for translating quick blocks of text on the fly (rather than the whole page).

2. Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger

If you add mtbot@hotmail.com to your Windows Live Messenger contacts, you can call the translation service on the fly via your messenger client. This is a robot translator that you can converse with and you can type “Tbot ?” to get a list of commands that it understands.

The first thing to do is to set up your language preferences. To do this type “TBot Change”. You will be led through a couple of menu choices to choose your source and target languages. Once set up, feel free to converse with the bot as if you are talking to another human, and everything you say will be translated and returned accordingly.

Really easy to use once you get used to the interface and an excellent use of the translator API’s. You can go to the Bot’s Live Space in the Relevant Links below for additional information.

Hint: You can add this user to any chat client that can understand MSN contacts (such as Pidgin for Linux!)

3. Windows Live Toolbar Translator Button

If you use the Windows Live Toolbar, you can easily incorporate online translation by adding the Translation Button to the toolbar. This is achieved by clicking the “+” icon in the toolbar and following the menu to add the Translator button.

You will be taken to the Live Gallery where you can Download and install the button.

Clicking on the Add button will download and add the button to your toolbar automatically. Now, whenever you are at a webpage that you need translating, simply hit the button on the toolbar and a new window will appear with the original and translated text.

When you mouse over any sentence in the original webpage, it even highlights the translated sentence in the translated page view. This is excellent for pinpointing which sentences go where.

If you don’t like the side by side view, you can click on the various view options on the top left to change to a top/bottom or a hover type navigation (where you can be on the original or translated page and hovering over the sentences shows a tooltip with the appropriate translation in it.

4. For Webmasters

Microsoft Translator Services have two services for Webmasters. You can add a Microsoft Translator easily into your website by including a quick line of code in your website code

This puts a small drop down into your page and allows the users to quickly select a language and translating the page. Hitting the arrow will take the user to a similar full page translation as above.

In addition, there is now a Widget available that allows on the fly translation without having to go through to a separate page. This increases user experience significantly. To get the widget code, you will need to get an invite from here: (http://www.microsofttranslator.com/Widget/)

I’m in the process of getting that widget installed on newbtech.

In Conclusion

Microsoft Translation services are good and easy to use. They provide value to both users as well as website authors and provide a better user experience overall. The Microsoft Team behind Translation Services have done a splendid job in expanding our capabilities to view information on the web that may have been otherwise hidden behind a language we may not understand.

Relevant Links

• Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog
• Microsoft Translator Forums
• Microsoft Translation Bot Space
• Webmasters and Blog Authors: Adding a Translator to your webpage

This post has now been superceded with an updated one. Please go below to see the new post:

Updated Article – Setting up Live SkyDrive with Gladinet 2.1

Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.

Prerequisites

you have an existing SkyDrive account. Easy enough to do if you follow my earlier guide: Microsoft SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

Step 1

The first step would be to download Gladinet onto your machine and install it. There are two versions available on the website (http://www.gladinet.com): a Free Starter one and a Professional Edition. The Professional Edition is on a limited introductory offer, but as it costs money, I will use the free version You can download either of them on the following page: Gladinet Editions Download Page. There is a version for both 32bit and 64bit operating systems (sadly no Linux).

Step 2

Once downloaded, complete the installation process. Select all the defaults (you may wish to change the install location, but apart from that, all else should be as normal).

When you launch the application for the first time, you’ll have an initial “Run Once Initial Settings” for the Cloud desktop.

Here, choose a drive letter that you want to assign to Gladinet and hit OK. In my case I chose “R” as my drive. Leave everything else as is and hit OK.

Important!

If you are running a server operating system (or one which has IIS running), you may get a message that states that Port 80 is being used already. It will ask to install a virtual adapter. Click Yes.

At this point, the Gladinet Virtual Driver will be installed.

If you continue to have an issue installing the virtual adapter, there is a troubleshooting guide in the install folder\WosHome called “GladinetTroubleShoot.pdf”. It may help resolve issues around Gladinet behaving with applications that also use Port 80 (such as Skype or IIS).

In my case, I changed my unassigned port on my local web server to port 81 and it worked fine. There are ways to preserve port 80 and have Gladinet coexist with your web server. Its detailed in the Troubleshooting guide.

Step 3

Assuming you have any possible conflict resolved, Gladinet will start. You can tell from a taskbar mini icon it will place on your start bar and it should show you an initial menu screen.

Click on “Mount Disk Storage or Web Storage As Virtual Directory”

Step 4

This will open up the Virtual Directory Manager.

As we’re adding SkyDrive, select “Windows Live SkyDrive” as the Service Provider.

The dialog box will change slightly to collect your SkyDrive credentials:

At this point you can create a “safe card” (refer to Gladinet for details) or just type in your SkyDrive credentials and click on Add.

Your username is your Windows Live Id (usually same as your MSN Messenger or Hotmail Id)

It will take a while to create the virtual directory and progress will be shown at the bottom of the screen. You may get a “Loading Online Storage Plugin” agreement dialog box. Hit Yes to this.

Step 5

Once its finished, a new Windows Explorer window will open up and show you the contents of your SkyDrive!

At this point you can navigate through the folders just like any other folder on your computer. If you happen to close your Windows Explorer, opening up My Computer later will show you the drive under Network Location (Vista) or Network Drives (Windows 2003).

You can also open up your drives by right clicking the Gladinet mini icon and selecting your drive

Via the same method, I managed to add Google Picasa as well as Google Docs to Gladinet as well.

When you drag a file into your SkyDrive, (if you chose the professional edition), you will be asked if you want to upload immediately or schedule it for later. Additionally, right-clicking on an “office” type document will display and option to read it in an appropriate viewer.

Conclusions

As a simple drag and drop access to your online storage, it does what’s asked of it. It gave me a network drive that allowed me to access my online data stores and i can easily upload and download documents to and from my drives.

Currently, its one of the best ways to really make use of SkyDrive without having to go through a web explorer.

You can continue to explore Gladinet on your own by right clicking its mini-icon and checking out the various options.

You may also wish to read our guide on other storage and collaboration solutions. Click the following post to have a look (opens in a new window):
11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing and Collaboration

Relevant Links

• Introduction to Live SkyDrive – how to log on and use SkyDrive
• Gladinet Home Page
• Gladinet Blog
• Gladinet Edition Comparisons – between Starter, Professional and Premium editions.

While I had the latest version of both installed at home, I had a major issue installing Windows Live Writer at work. I run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop at work and the installer for Windows Live simply refused to work on it.

After a bit of research, i found that it was only the installer that had the issue and I could install Windows Live Writer via the .msi. In the end, I found the .msi file in my temp folder on my Vista machine at home. (I also found an .msi on the net, but that was for either Dutch or an older version). This one is for Windows Live Writer 2009

For others who are running Windows Server 2003 and the installer complaining, I’ve uploaded the .msi file to my Skydrive. You can download it from here:

http://tinyurl.com/gimmeWindowsLiveWriterMSI

NOTE: This is the 32 bit version!

If you need any other MSI’s (eg, Live Messenger, etc), please leave a comment or send me an email.

I’d appreciate a comment if this helps you in any way :)

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