Becoming a true “digital nomad” now just got easier seeing the solid direction Microsoft is now taking its suite of world-dominating apps. The news recently that its Office Online service will now be simply called “Office” indicates that the Cloud is definitely where it’s gonna be at in the future. In fact our three favorite killer MS apps — Word, Excel and Power Point — are now available online and accessible using any browser. All you need to do is open a Microsoft account!
The user experience is amazing. The look and feel of the browser versions of these apps are almost identical to the conventional versions you install on your PC. Best of all, no more having to do updates and buy expensive licenses for features you hardly use. This brings us to an important caveat surrounding the use of these “free” browser-accessible apps — they don’t provide all the features of their desktop cousins.
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But, really, when you’re on the road or working from a hammock by the beach, you wouldn’t really be in much of a mood to code VBA macros, right? The basic features of MS Offices — which are available from the new free Cloud — pretty much suffice for 90% of users and, for advanced users like moi, good enough for on-the-go low-prolonged-concentration-required work. Speaking of which, VBA may no longer be the killer coding platform for non-coders that it used to be anyway. More on that in a later article.
The world is now a better place! We no longer are wholly dependent on a PC-compatible device to do MS Office. It’s no longer an issue now that Office is delivered as a service via Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or — horrors! — Internet Explorer. And when all your stuff is on the cloud, you can access these and your apps from any device including your smartphone or tablet. It’s literally just a tap away. Hardware is now no longer an issue, road warriors!
Digital nomad in the making