The latest revision of Office 365 includes a great feature called Office on Demand – this is available for Office 365 Home Premium, Small Business, Midsize and Enterprise. In a nutshell, it allows you to use a full version of Office programs** on a public computer without having to install anything. As soon as you close the application, the streamed version of Office disappears and you’re all done!
** Supported client applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Project & Visio (Provided you have Project Pro or Visio Pro for Office 365 subscriptions)
Office 365 Home Premium Users:
Go to http://office.com, and log in to My Office:
Since this is the Home Premium version of Office 365, you’re going to be using a Microsoft account not an organizational account.
Once you type in your address, it’ll automatically redirect you to the Microsoft account login page – go ahead and sign in.
Once you log in, you’ll see your recent documents – you can click on one of your recent documents to trigger Office on Demand, or just click on the program you want to run from the options below:
Do I want to use Office on Demand? DO I EVER!!
Install the plugin that pops up (this is the only actual software that gets installed to the computer):
Click Run:
And sit back while Office begins to stream the program you requested – on a normal, fairly fast internet connection this process took less than a minute before I had Word open and ready to start typing.
Well, that was easy!
If you check your installed programs, you’ll see the only thing that got installed was the Browser Add-on… very nice and clean
Office 365 Enterprise (or Small / Midsize Business) Users:
For the business user, the process is similar, and just as easy: Log in to your Office 365 portal at https://login.microsoftonline.com, and click on SkyDrive:
Down the left navigation, click on Use Office on Demand:
Same as before, click on the Program you want to run:
One especially awesome thing about this feature is that you can sign in to Office from within Word (or whatever program you’re using), and save the documents you’re creating right back to your SkyDrive, or open files from your SkyDrive and edit them in your streamed copy of Office.
This is a great feature for when you need more functionality than the built in web apps (which are already pretty awesome) can provide – Great job, Microsoft!
Master & CmdR 