TutorialsSoftwareMicrosoft OfficeTutorial – Microsoft Office Live Workspace – Setting up

Tutorial – Microsoft Office Live Workspace – Setting up

Written by Marc Roberge | 02 March 2010

How to share and collaborate on Excel Spreadsheets or Workbooks, Word documents or PowerPoint slideshows online for free using Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta.

If you are involved in a project that requires input or editing from different project members, you may be doing it the hard way. Microsoft Office Live offers a free platform to host your MS Office documents and allow collaborative editing. Gone are the days of collaborating via email, sending your spreadsheets or text documents as attachments, waiting for the edited versions to return and merging the data. Gone are the days of countless meetings and tasking.

With Microsoft Office Live, you are able to upload your project files to your own private and secure workspace, email invitations to your collaborators and allow real time and simultaneous editing of your project documents from any computer with Internet access. You will need to have Microsoft Office installed on your computer. There are other online collaborative services such as Google Docs and Zoho - Work. Online. – and we will cover both of these in future articles.

To create an account and setup your own Workspace, click: Microsoft Office Live or type this address in your browser address bar: http://officelive.com/en-us/. Once you’ve reached the site, click the “Get Started Free” button.

On the next page, type in your email address and click “Next”.

If you do not already have a Windows Live ID you will need to create and account. You will be directed to this page. Simply fill in all the required form fields and click “Finish”.

If you already have a Windows Live ID, you will be directed to this page. Simply type in your password and “Sign In”.

Once logged in, from the left hand menu, click “New Workspace” to create a new project workspace.

In this next step, you can choose to create a “Blank Workspace” or select a preconfigured workspace from the list. In this tutorial, we will be creating a “Project Workspace”.

If you would like to modify your workspace name (from the default “Workspace_1”), simply hover your mouse pointer over your newly created workspace on the left hand side. From the pop up menu, select “Rename”.

Simply type in your desired workspace name.

If you want to edit your profile/contact information, simply hover your mouse pointer over your workspace name and select “Edit profile” from the pop up menu.

Fill in your information and click “Save Changes”.

From your Workspace documents area, because we selected the preconfigured “Project Workspace” we have several default documents in place. If you had chosen “Blank Workspace” your current documents area would be bare. To delete any of these default documents, simply click the appropriate checkboxes and click the “Delete” button.

If you wish to edit any of these documents, simply click on the document title and the document will open. In this example, I’ve opened the “To-do list”. Simply type in your information in the appropriate fields. To add a row, click the “Add Row” button on the bottom left. To save your changes, click the “Save” button. To share this file with other project collaborators, click the “Share” button. To add a comment to the file, click “Comment”. To view recent activity, click “Activity” and to close the document…well, you click “Close”.

Back to your workspace, if you wish to add your own project documents (a spreadsheet for example), click the “Add Documents” button.

Navigate to your file, select it and click “Open”.

Once your file has uploaded, click it’s title to open it. To edit the file, click “Edit” from the upper menu.

You may be prompted to install required updates. These updates will require that you restart your computer. In addition, your project collaborators will like have to complete these updates as well before they are able to edit files in your workspace.

If you click “Install now”, you will be prompted to save the “setup.exe” file.

Save it to your "Desktop”.

Once the download is complete, go to your desktop and double-click the file to start the updates installation. Once installed, you will see this message. Click “Close” and restart your computer and continue onto your Windows Live Workspace.

Once your computer has restarted and you’ve logged into your office live workspace, open up your document and click the “Edit” button.

You will be show this warning message. Click “Ok”.

Your local installed copy of Word, Excel or PowerPoint will open. Sign in using your .NET passport (Windows Live ID) and click “Ok”.

Edit the file as you normally would. When you are done, Save your file and it will automatically update in your Office Workspace.

If you click on the “Activity” button, you will see that your recent changes has been recorded by Office Live.

To share your workspace with project collaborators, click the “Share” button and choose “Share Workspace” from the drop down menu.

Enter email addresses for “Editors” and “Viewers” in the appropriate fields. Editors can edit files while viewers are only able to read files and comments. Type in a message and click “Send”.