The Seattle Times recently began publishing interactive data online using a free cloud-based tool: Microsoft Office Web Apps on SkyDrive. So far, we have mostly dabbled with Excel spreadsheets, but we hope to use more of the software in the future.

Office Web Apps is in some ways similar to Google Docs and can be used to store files and share documents with small groups of users.

At The Seattle Times, we use it to present interactive data to our readers. SkyDrive allows us to share our documents by generating some iframe code. We can also tweak the code ourselves ...