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Avoid Windows Live confusion

by Office Watch 3 February 2010

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You don’t need a live.com address to get Office Web Applications

We’ve had various emails from readers who are trying Office Web Applications and sharing documents with plenty of confusion.

Most of the confusion comes when sharing an online document. Sharing access is given via an email address, not a name.

The problem comes if a person has more than one Windows Live login. It seems some people end up with two accounts – one using their most commonly used address (which could be anywhere) and another based on a Microsoft hosted email account like live.com or hotmail.com .

You can’t gain access to a document if you login to one account and the shared document is linked to the other Windows Live login/address.

To fix this you need to login to the other Windows Live account or ask the document owner to adjust the sharing settings.

These days many of us have multiple email addresses, this is just one example of how all these addresses can get confusing.

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You don’t need to use a live.com or hotmail.com Windows Live login, in fact it’s probably better if you don’t. A Windows Live login using your regular email address is usually better than an address you don’t normally check or use.

Using Multiple Accounts

Having multiple Windows Live logins can be useful if you have several ‘hats’ in your life.

One Windows Live account for personal matters and another for work might suit you, though it might be easier to have documents in separate Skydrive folders under the one Windows Live login.

Google

The same suggestions apply to Google accounts – you don’t need to use a Gmail account login to access Google Docs or other Google services.

However using a Gmail login isn’t as much of a problem because you can configure a Gmail account to automatically forward incoming messages to your regular email address.

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