Microsoft Office Live

People who need to access your shared MS Office documents via a SkyDrive link should now find the process a bit easier.

Using Microsoft's Office Web Apps or Office 2013, you can create a URL of any document that you store online. You can then e-mail that URL to anyone who needs to view or edit your file. Previously, that process required your collaborators to sign in with a Microsoft account before they could tweak your document. Now that restriction is gone.

Users who receive the URL to your document can click on it to view the file in … Read more

Microsoft has finally unveiled Microsoft Office 2013. CNET's already had a chance to do an in-depth review of Office 365, the subscription version of Office 2013. Have more questions? Check out our answers below.… Read more

Updated at 2:27 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to further clarify the differences among the Office options.

Along with all the new features, the latest version of Microsoft Office, released today (read CNET's review), is now available as a standalone suite and by subscription. The options are tailored toward different use cases, depending on your productivity requirements.

Office 365 Home Premium, $99.99 per year, five PCs/Macs/Windows tablets: This is the "Microsoft recommended" version of Office. It comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, 20GB of SkyDrive storage, 60 … Read more

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer insists the software giant is really a devices and services company.

Today, the company makes one of its biggest pushes yet, launching a subscription service of its Office franchise to consumers who are increasingly doing their computing on mobile gadgets and Web applications. The software giant debuts Office 365 Home Premium, the latest offering from its widely used productivity software group.

The new service, which costs $99.99 a year, offers consumers access to the most recent version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. The license covers up to five devices and … Read more

To most tech watchers, Microsoft is a giant software maker.

But that's not how Microsoft sees itself anymore. For the past several months, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has repeated as often as he possibly can that the tech behemoth is now a devices and services company. He was a plain as he could be in the annual letter he wrote to shareholders in October.

"This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves -- as a devices and services company." Ballmer wrote. "It impacts how we run the company, … Read more

In the numbers race that dominates the headline competition between big technology providers these days, here are a couple more figures, courtesy of Microsoft: The Windows Store now has 120,000 apps, accessible in 191 countries. That's according to Windows Phone Program Manager Joe Belfiore, who took the stage in San Francisco on Monday morning as the company officially launched Windows Phone 8. Out of the 50 top smartphone apps, 46 are now on the Windows Phone, he added. For comparison, Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms each have more than 700,000 app available. 

Microsoft … Read more

Microsoft's Office 2013 Web Apps suite is now a final and official part of SkyDrive.

The online Office suite has been available for SkyDrive users since July. But it's been in a customer preview mode still being tweaked by Microsoft. A tweet yesterday from Omar Shahine, a SkyDrive group product manager, confirmed that the final edition is now live.

SkyDrive users who create or open a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote file will see it pop up in the completed 2013 edition of Office Web Apps. Opening a file created under the previous version triggers a message that … Read more

Google Docs has made some inroads against Microsoft Office, but not nearly enough.

That's no doubt a big reason for Google's latest acquisition, Quickoffice, announced today. Now the question becomes will the cross-mobile-platform productivity suite Quickoffice give Google a better leg up against Microsoft's Office?

Quickoffice runs on iPhones, iPad, Android, Android tablets and Symbian devices. And Office 15, the coming version of Microsoft's productivity app suite, will run on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone and, perhaps soon the iPad and Android, too. The one-two punch of Office 15 (aka Office 2013, the … Read more

Microsoft is pouncing on the recent bad press about Google in an attempt to win over more customers.

Frank Shaw, corporate VP for Microsoft's Corporate Communications group, boasted in a blog today that Microsoft offers people a safer choice than Google, which has been buffeted by worries over its new privacy policies. The company also plans a bigger ad campaign to exploit what it sees as Google's recent missteps.

Google's woes follow its move to alter its privacy policies to share user information across different products and services. The company has even been forced to justify its decision to Congress, … Read more