Today the home page at http://www.office.com features a much richer way to preview templates than the wee thumbnails the site traditionally offers.

Click a template, and it opens read-only in your browser, where you can see it full-size, exactly as it was formatted in the Office program where it was created. For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, if you want to use the template, click Download to store it on your computer, where you can open it in your desktop Office program (the OneNote templates include a link to where they can be downloaded).

If your version of Office is Office 2003 or earlier you’ll need a converter to open the template. You can download the converter for free here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470%2D3AE9%2D4AEE%2D8F43%2DC6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

Keep in mind that you can use your public SkyDrive folder to post Office documents on the web the same way the Office.com team did.

Got a newsletter to publicize your organization’s event? If you create it in Word, you don’t need to publish it to the web, convert it to HTML, or save it as a PDF file. Just upload it to your SkyDrive, in a folder where the permission is set to Everyone (public). Then, click the file to open it in the browser (in Reading view). In your web browser, copy the address of the document:

…and paste it wherever you want people to have a link to your newsletter, such as an email message or your Facebook status. When they follow the link, they’ll be able to view your newsletter exactly as you formatted it in Word—regardless of whether they have Word, or which version of Word they have.

Roxanne Kenison writes about Office Web Apps on Office.com.