A few years ago, I worked with a company that was pretty small, but very tech savvy. We needed a way to share and collaborate on documents without using Sharepoints or anything complicated, so we signed up for Google Apps and started trying to use Google's online document editors. However, after just a few days, we totally abandoned the option, simply because the editors weren't user-friendly enough.

Google has come quite far since then, however once you use the Office Ribbon interface, there's no going back. I've also had formatting issues going from one program to another, so I've kept to Office for the past few years. However, Microsoft has now unleashed Office Live, and I've taken to the cloud once again.

Here's the little demo document that I made up to show off the features of the Word Web App, as it's called. Let's tear it down piece by piece real quick:

1. Right off the bat, styles are supported just like in the real Word 2010, so if you've become totally dependent on that piece of the ribbon, you'll be right at home. Oddly enough, the underline that should be on the title isn't there in the online version, but it's there in the desktop.

2. The font selection is quite good, and size, color and highlights all happen as well.

3. When you click the "Open in Word" button, it really just opens up in Word. The process is a little slow at this time, so we'll have to see if MS can speed that up. Hit save in Word, and it's saved on the SkyDrive. It does download and save everything encrypted too, in case you were wondering.

4. Links autocorrect into real links like they should, clipart is available and auto-correct works on spelling too. Really, it's very much like being in Word.

5. Luckily enough, all of this works in Firefox just as well as Internet Explorer, so I imagine Safari and Chrome are also ready to go.

So where are the downfalls? No, it's not perfect at all. I noticed one big, glaring issue which is with comments. If you are using Word, you'll no doubt have found the comment button and are using it every time you need to mark-up a document. However, once comments are added to a document, it can no longer be edited in the Word Web App. It can be viewed, along with the comments, but it can't be changed, nor can more comments be added. For a program that is supposed to help people collaborate on documents, this is a big pitfall in my opinion. Once the comments are deleted in Word, then Word Web App can edit it again.

The speed is also an issue. One of my biggest frights is that this whole cloud computing thing will really take off, and we will be forced into this mode of waiting for servers. I've spent the past 10 years pushing my computer faster and faster, and opening a Word document is almost instantaneous on my system these days. At most, I have a 2 second wait for a document. When opening a document from my SkyDrive, that time goes to 10+ seconds, which is way too long. Opening a document in the Word Web App is better, but still around 5 seconds or so, which is much slower than my desktop.

Finally, the synchronization options are quite limited. If I could tell my SkyDrive to keep up with my Documents library automatically, that would be one thing, but I can't. I really don't have the time or patience to copy my documents to another location every time I save them. I could write a script to do it, but that should really be done for me, just as easily as the rest of it is.

So there you have it. Office Live has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for free with your Live account. Go check it out!