Go to Office.com and sign in with a free Microsoft account to see this view of Microsoft's free Office services. The Office on Demand links at the bottom are only there for paid subscribers with an Office 365 Home Premium account.

For a more complete discussion, see  Are Microsoft's free Office Web Apps good enough for you?

In SkyDrive, documents are color coded so you can distinguish them at a glance: Blue for Word, orange for PowerPoint, green for Excel, purple for OneNote. Unsupported file types appear in gray.

From anywhere in SkyDrive, you can click the Create menu to display this list of supported document types. After you enter a name, the new document opens immediately for editing in the corresponding Office Web App.

The Excel Web App looks remarkably like its desktop equivalent. Many advanced features are missing, but it's possible to get a lot done here. Look in the lower right corner, and you can see that two people are working on this document simultaneously.

Using the Excel Web App lets you create a chart of the right type, but your advanced formatting options are severely limited. You can't change a background color, for example. For that, you need to open the associated spreadsheet in the Excel desktop app. (By the way, did I mention that I'm using the Excel Web App in Google Chrome here?)

You don't need to explicitly save most Office documents when editing them in a Web App. They're saved automatically, and SkyDrive also keeps copies of previous versions, so you can recover something you deleted from an earlier draft and then regretted.

Yes, Google Drive will open a spreadsheet save in Excel's native file format, but you might not like the results. This default view is essentially a print preview, and the chart in the native file doesn't appear in its proper place.

When I used the Open With menu to convert this Excel spreadsheet to Google Sheets format, I got access to this full set of tools, and the spreadsheet survived the trip apparently intact.

You can make a few customizations in the Google Chart Editor, but the options are far from extensive. While this option is good enough for making quick charts, you'll want a much more powerful app to make presentation-worthy charts and graphics.

This editing page with the Home tab open looks remarkably like the desktop version of Word. In the document itself, you can see familiar features like highlighters (yellow's the classic color, but 15 others are available), spell check (see the red squiggle?), and a quick formatting toolbar that appears when you right-click.

This feature might not be immediately intuitive. You can toggle any Word document (ditto for Excel and PowerPoint) between Reading View and Edit View. In Reading View, you'll find a Comments command above the document, which in turn opens the sidebar shown here. But if you choose Edit Document, the comments aren't available.

Two things are noteworthy about this document as created in Google Docs. First, it's black and white, unlike the colorful Google Drive home page. And second, the interface is largely driven by pull-down menus, with a single row of toolbar buttons that can't be customized.

If you've used the desktop PowerPoint program, you'll feel right at home with the Web App. This is the default Editing View (there's also Reading View and Slide Show). Notice that two people are editing this presentation simultaneously, and the comments pane is available for conversations about any slide.

When you create a new slide using the PowerPoint Web App, you get this long list of layouts. Compare them to the equivalent from Google.

Compare this short list of themes to the much larger selection of graphic options in the PowerPoint Web App (in the previous slide).

Google doesn't have an equivalent to OneNote in its collection of online apps. The OneNote Web App allows two or more people to share information in a single notebook, with changes synchronizing practically in real time. Note that we've turned on the option to show authors' names next to additions.

Of the four main Office apps, only OneNote currently has a native app that runs on Windows 8 or Windows RT. This app is especially useful for serving as the target for the Share charm. Select some text from a web page, click the Share charm, and choose OneNote as the Share target. Your selection is pasted into its own new page (or the current page, if you prefer), along with a link to the page.

This is one feature I haven't seen many people mention before. When you use the new Office Web Apps on a tablet or a PC with touch hardware, you'll see a Touch Mode icon in the toolbar in the top left of the web page. On this Slate PC, it's selected, providing extra room for touch targets. Note that the pop-up formatting menu changes shape in Touch Mode, too, with bigger, easier-to-hit targets.