In the coming months, Microsoft will unveil a Google Docs like product that will let users create and edit Office documents in the browser itself without requiring a copy of Microsoft Office software.

The product, known as “Office Web Apps”, will include online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Like Google Docs, Office Web Apps will be available for free and you can use it from all popular browsers on Mac or Windows PC even without the Silverlight plug-in.

How to get Microsoft Office Web Apps

Microsoft is expected to ship Office Web Apps alongside Microsoft Office 2010 sometime next year but here’s a simple hack that will help you access the preview version of Office Web Apps right now…

via Get Access to Web-based Microsoft Office Apps Now!.

Google on Thursday wrote in a blog post that “in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines…This is a very exciting change, as your published docs linked to from public Web sites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

via Your Google docs: Soon in search results? | Webware – CNET.

SocialWok lays a social network on top of your email, Calendar, Docs, Sites and so on – something that the Google Apps suite was missing when being used as the main infrastructure for an organisation.

Access Gmail Through Alternate Modes

Just because the Gmail web interface went down doesn’t mean that Gmail is entirely down—often you can continue to access your account using one of the alternate web interfaces, which often are still accessible even when the regular web interface goes down.

via How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker.

via Embeddable Google Document Viewer.

via Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps – Google Apps – Lifehacker.

Total list of supported formats: csv, doc, docx, html, htm, ods, odt, pdf, ppt, pps, rtf, sxw, tsv, tab, txt, xls, xlsx.

To run the application you need Java 1.6 or greater installed.

via google-docs-upload – Project Hosting on Google Code.

Now the more interesting part. Let’s see how we can free up some important disk space in our Gmail inbox using a simple strategy:

Step 1: Track down bulky email messages in your Gmail inbox that contain large file attachments.

Step 2: Save these attachments to the local hard drive.

Step 3. After the attachments are saved locally, remove them from the online mailbox without deleting the corresponding email message(s).

via Delete Large Email Attachments from your Gmail Inbox to Free Up Space.

The Problem with Google Docs

While Google Docs is a great place for uploading documents that you want to share with the world, there’s one basic problem with that approach – most people won’t ever find your public Google documents on the Internet unless they have the direct URLs.

via Let Search Engines Index Your Google Documents and Presentations.

There’s something pure about having nothing but the essentials.

Now, some of you will recall a couple of other posts I did, and let’s quickly review them for background:

via Minimalist Gmail: How to Get Rid of the Non-Essentials.