Page 168 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

Although Word Online is still Microsoft Word, there are some differences between the two. The biggest difference is that Word runs on your local computer, and Word Online runs in the cloud and is accessed by using your web browser.
When you fire up Word on your local computer and create a document, that document can either stay on your local computer or be saved to the cloud. When you click the Save button and save the document, you are prompted for the place where you want to save the file. For example, you can choose to save in a cloud location (such as OneDrive or Dropbox) or you can choose to save the document on your local computer in a location such as the Documents directory or your Desktop. In any case, your creation is a file located on a cloud-based storage loca- tion or your local computer.
GOING BEHIND THE SCENES
The cloud is just a fancy way of describing the act of accessing software and computer resources over the Internet. For example, when you create a Word Online document, it is not some mystical and magical fog that is conjured up from the mists of the Internet. To track down where the actual Word file lives requires a bit of detective work, but it is entirely possible.
Office 365 is nothing more than server software that Microsoft has installed on comput- ers in their data centers around the world. For example, if you are on the West coast, then the physical data center that your Office 365 software is running in might be in the state of Washington. You access this server software over the Internet. Because you don’t know, or even really care, where the actual data center is located, you can say it is running “in the cloud.”
Now, to track down that file you created with Office Online, you need to think about where you saved it. If you saved it to SharePoint, then you saved it into a document library app. We know that SharePoint uses a database product called SQL Server to store all of its content and configuration information. So, when you are saving some- thing to SharePoint, you are actually saving it to an SQL Server database. That SQL Server database is running in the Microsoft data center in the state of Washington (or Hong Kong, or Germany — or wherever the closest Microsoft data center is located).
Opening your web browser, pointing it at SharePoint Online, and clicking on a Word document to open or print it is actually very easy to accomplish. Behind the scenes, however, SharePoint Online (running in a Microsoft data center) is contacting the SQL Server program (also running in the Microsoft data center) and requesting the specific Word document. SharePoint then sends that to your web browser, and you see it magi- cally appear.
152 PART4 DivingintoOfficeOnline