office on the web

Most people only need a real simple office suite. The basics of word processing, and spread sheet. Maybe a little presentation work. These days you can move all that to the cloud. Web based applications have some real advantages over regular ones. First off, web framework provides many high level tools for layout. This makes for a rather small footprint (especially if you already have a browser opened). The program is downloaded every time you run it, so it is always up to date. If you are using someone else's computer, they don't need to have any special software to read your data. Also, if your data is also saved in the cloud, you don't need to worry about backups or brining the data with you.

Obviously there are security concerns depending what you are working on. However on the other end of the spectrum, if you need to share your data, This is the best use for you. The one provided by Google is pretty basic. I would suggest numsum. It gives the added function of graphs. As far as I know, none of the online ones offer macros, but they all seem to give you standard functions. That, and database-like collaboration. With google spreadsheet, I know people have had a group editing the same table at the same time. Every time you update a cell, it saves that change to the server. Then anyone else viewing it sees that change happen on there screen.