The notion of not having your files on your own machine that you can feel and touch, but one which can only be accessed via the Internet, is still an emerging concept for most of us.   Purists still prefer the old fashioned way of doing things — with an office suite on their personal computer, another on their laptop  and a variant on the tablet. Many of us don’t even pay for these variants, which the local computer vendor often so obligingly installs for us from his vast library of pirated software But these days, when the pitfalls of pirated software are too many to be ignored any longer, and with plenty of alternatives available to the Microsoft office, the need for having an application installed on your computing device is getting limited — assuming you have a sound broadband connection.

It makes sense to put files on the cloud, so we can access them via multiple devices such as a tablet, a laptop on the move or even a smartphone in some cases. We need to have the right tools to modify, edit, share or present the information. An “office in the cloud” works very well in such cases in a connected world. This week we look at two options of an online office environment, where you view, create and edit documents, spreadsheets or presentations. What’s more, you can do all this for free.