Document Editing on the Cheap: How to Use Microsoft Office for Free on the Web

If you want to use Microsoft Office but don't want to pay for it, why not try the free Office for the web? Formerly known as Office Online and now known simply as Office, the web-based apps reside online, accessible through your browser.

Instead of installing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on your computer, you use free, cloud-based versions of these programs, similar to Google Docs. And rather than store your files and documents on your computer, you save them to Microsoft OneDrive, the company's cloud-based storage service.

Office for the web isn't as feature-packed as its desktop counterpart. You'll find all the standard editing and formatting commands, and some additional features, but not much more. However, if all you need are the basics, this is an option worth trying.

Office for the web offers online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, OneDrive, Skype, Calendar, and People. You can even work with more niche applications. An app called Sway allows you to create interactive reports and presentations, while a Forms app lets you create online surveys and quizzes. Here's how to get started using the Office for the web apps if you want to create, edit, and save your documents.

Sign Up and Get Started

If you don't already have one, set up a Microsoft Account. Your account will come with 5GB of free OneDrive storage; if you need more, you can snag 100GB for $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. Navigate to the Office website and sign in with your Microsoft Account.

At the Office website, there are icons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. After you start creating and saving Office files, they’ll appear at the bottom of the page as recent documents so you can more easily access them.

Create New Files

You can create a new document a few different ways. Click the plus (+) button on the left-hand sidebar or the New button in the middle of the page. Then select the type of file you want to create from the pop-up window. You can open a new Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, Form, Quiz, or Sway page.

Alternatively, click the square-shaped App launcher icon in the top-left corner. Click the All Apps link to see all available apps and select the one you want. You can also click the All Apps icon at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to see all the Microsoft 365 apps.

As an example, we’ll use Word, but you can choose any of the Office apps. Click Word to launch the new document page, where you can select a template or create a new document from scratch. Word offers templates for resumes, cover letters, flyers, and calendars. If you don't need a special template, just click New blank document to open a blank page.

You’ll find all the basic editing options in the Word toolbar to set the font, text size, and other styles; insert tables and pictures; add page numbers, headers, and footers; adjust the page size, margins, and orientation; zoom in and out of your document; and run a spell check.

Save Documents

Your document takes on a default name of Document 1, Document 2, etc., but you can click the Name field at the top of the document to change the name.

By default, your document is saved in the root location of your OneDrive storage space. If you plan to work with a lot of different documents, you may want to create specific folders in OneDrive to store these files. If you want to save a copy of your document in a specific folder, go to File > Save As > Save as to save a copy to a folder in OneDrive.

Navigate through your OneDrive space and select the folder to which you want to save your document, then click Save. Afterwards, your document automatically saves periodically so you don’t have to manually keep saving it as you do with the desktop version of Word.

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From the Save As menu in Office, you can also download the file to your PC, either as a Word document or a PDF. You can perform other actions from the File menu, like printing your document, turning it into a web page, and sharing it with other people. You can also find a previous version of the document, create a new document, and open an existing document.

To access another Office app from your current one, click the App launcher button in the top left. If the app you want to use doesn’t appear, click the All Apps link. You can then select your application of choice.

Open an Existing File

Instead of starting a new document, you can open any existing documents or files that you’ve already created and saved to OneDrive. If you’re already in the app for that file, click the File menu and you’ll see a list of recent documents. You can then click the one you want to open.

If you’re at the home page for Microsoft Office on the web, recent documents appear at the bottom of the screen. Just click the one you want. You can even pin a specific file for easier access. That file is then accessible from the Pinned tab.

If the file you want doesn’t appear as a recent document, you’ll need to venture into OneDrive to look for it. Click the icon for OneDrive on the bottom right and navigate to the folder in which the file is stored.

To more easily find the file, click the Sort menu and change the criteria to Modified and Descending. You can also search for a file by name using the Search tool.

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