Yesterday, Microsoft officially launched Windows Live Office with Office Web Apps for english-speaking users (US, UK, Canada & Ireland). But anyone can already use them by switching the language in the Live ID account to English. Documents can be accessed in Office menu or SkyDrive menu. To understand why, read our review. Unfortunately, the first impression of Windows Live Office - is negative. Of course, we knew that online office apps will be light. And the fact that there are no diagrams and no cell autofill in the Excel Web App, and no rich paste in OneNote Web App, and no file move between folders in Live Office - all these is not disappointing. But the main thing that we expected - correct Word formatting support - actually doesn't work.

Microsoft has done a great job to confuse users with their online office applications. Office Live, Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business, Live Folders, Foldershare, Live Docs, SkyDrive, Live Mesh, Docs.com, Office Web Apps - a lot of similar in functionality or name services, formed in result of numerous acquisitions and rebrandings. Taking into account the existence of Exchange and Sharepoint SaaS versions (BPOS), it becomes a mystery - what Microsoft's online office suite is and what it's target audience. The new version of Windows Live Wave 4 (which includes the online office) is trying to bring this chaos into order, however, again  by the numerous mergers and renamings. Let's try to understand all this stuff.

At last (after the July announcement) Microsoft is opening web-based Office 2010  applications to beta-testers. The web Office will have a long official title: Microsoft Office Web Applications. As we already informed, it will be available in two editions: Free and Business. The business version will work on top of SharePoint 2010 (behind the firewall). And free version will work on top of the online file storage service  Windows Live SkyDrive (that provides 25Gb for free). Yesterday one thousand of SkyDrive happy users already got an access to online Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. And their reviews are quite different - from "awesome" to "tedious". Here are the most interesting points: