From time to time, I find myself working on a server and thinking it would be useful to be able to open a document and, whilst WordPad usually manages to open enough of a Word document for me to get by, sometimes I need to open a spreadsheet – and this is what happened a few minutes ago when I was checking to see if a couple of hotfixes were included in Windows Server 2008 service pack 2.

Microsoft publishes this information as an Excel spreadsheet, which is all very well if I want to open it on my PC, but doesn’t help if I’m working directly on a server (which is unlikely to have any Office applications installed).

This is where my Office Live Workspace came in handy. I uploaded the file to my online Documents workspace and, within a few seconds, I was able to preview it (including searching for the relevant hotfix numbers), without having to go and find a computer with Excel installed.