Following latest Office 365 launch, SkyDrive now hosting 1B Office documents

Looks like connecting the world’s top document software with the cloud is paying off. Microsoft has announced that more than one billion Office documents are now stored in SkyDrive, following the launch of Office 365 Home Premium last week.

SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for consumers and businesses. To account for the growing reliance people have on the cloud, Microsoft made it so that Office 365 simultaneously saves documents to a local hard drive and SkyDrive to make sure your documents are always backed up. That set up has clearly increased SkyDrive usage, along with the growing number of SkyDrive users using Windows 8, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.

Microsoft Group Program Manager Omar Shahine writes in a blog post today:

Last week Office 365 Home Premium launched and we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm over the seamless integration of SkyDrive for saving and sharing your docs. Recently we reached a big milestone; our customers are now storing over a billion Office documents on SkyDrive! We’re really excited about the feedback we’ve seen around the new version of Office and the deep integration of SkyDrive. We’re taking it a step further today by announcing a new feature in SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps that allows a more seamless sharing and editing experience for our customers.

The new sharing and editing feature is relatively minor, but we’ll take any feature that makes our lives a little easier. Microsoft has made it so that all recipients you send a SkyDrive “edit link” to will be able to make changes to a document in Office Web Apps without signing into a Microsoft account. Ideally, that makes editing and collaborating on documents using SkyDrive less of a hassle.

Have you tried SkyDrive or are Dropbox and Google Drive more your thing?

Powerpoint image via Microsoft