Microsoft Office is the world’s most widely used productivity suite. Most organizations store their documents as Word files, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations — so if you request information from someone, there’s a good chance it arrives as an Office file. If you’re on Windows Live (Hotmail), you can already open and edit these files online. If you’re on Gmail, Google Docs can handle them too, though formatting sometimes doesn’t survive the conversion.

There’s another option though: Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps Viewer, which is part of SkyDrive and available to all Windows Live users.

If you’re a Windows Live user, you can sign in and open any Office document directly from your inbox in the web app viewer. You can also create and edit Office documents right from SkyDrive.

But here’s the useful part even if you don’t have a Windows Live account: you can still use the Office Web Apps Viewer to open any publicly accessible Office file on the web. Just append the file’s URL to the viewer address like this:

http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://ankurm.com/pages/word.doc

Say you have two files hosted at:

• www.example.com/document.doc
• www.example.com/presentation.ppt

You’d open them like this:

http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=http://www.example.com/document.doc

http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=http://www.example.com/presentation.ppt

Office Web Apps are noticeably better than Google Docs when it comes to rendering Office file formatting. Google Docs has an edge in file type support — it handles PDFs, Photoshop files, and even AutoCAD drawings, which Office Web Apps doesn’t. But for pure Office document fidelity, Microsoft’s viewer wins.

Note: Microsoft has since renamed SkyDrive to OneDrive.