5 reasons why SkyDrive exceeds Google Drive

If you're looking for a new service to sync and store files across multiple devices and the cloud, you should give SkyDrive a serious look. Not only do you get more free storage, but you'll also have an easier time managing online documents and you get free remote access to your home PC while you're on the go. Google Drive may be the current media darling, but for people just looking to get some work done here's why you should give SkyDrive a try.

Drive may offer deep integration with Google Docs, but Google Docs file formats do not offer deep integration with the rest of the productivity software world. If you want to edit a document in Google Docs you have to convert that file to Google's online formats. It doesn't matter if your original file was a simple text or HTML document, or the world's de facto standard, a Microsoft Office format. All of these files must be converted to Docs format before you can edit them. So when you download a native Docs file from Google Docs to your Drive folder, you are downloading a link that opens the document in your browser instead of the actual file.

SkyDrive and Microsoft Web Apps, on the other hand, favor Microsoft Office formats such as DOCX, XLSX, PPTX . These are formats that almost any desktop and online productivity software can open. And if you need to edit a Word document on the go, you can use Microsoft's Office Web Apps without having to worry about converting your files to an exotic file format.

More Free Storage

SkyDrive offers 7GB of free storage to its users, an extra 2GB of free storage compared to Drive's initial 5GB. That's about 400 more photos you can cram into SkyDrive. Also, if you were a SkyDrive user before the recent switch to 7GB of free storage, you can reclaim your free 25GB of storage by visiting SkyDrive's Manage Storage page.