Skype comes to Office Online so you can chat while you edit

Microsoft has announced the further integration of Skype across its services, and you can now make calls and chat from within Office Online and OneDrive.

As Redmond notes, this furthers the collaborative power of its online Office suite, allowing multiple users to co-edit a document and chat in-line about the various changes that they're making.

The clever bit is that the chat history stays attached to the document, so the next time you open it to work on the file collaboratively, all your previous discussion is brought back up in case you need to reference something said in the past.

Similarly, you can chat with friends or colleagues while browsing through folders and documents that are stored in Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage locker.

Better Outlook

Redmond also said that Skype integration with Outlook.com which began rolling out a few months back is now complete, so all users of Microsoft's webmail service now have Skype available so they can fire up a chat while they're composing an email.

In other Skype news, another language has been added to Skype Translator, namely Arabic, the fifth most commonly spoken language in the world. Translator now supports eight languages: English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.

As we've found when using Skype Translator, it's pretty impressive on the accuracy front, and while not perfect it's certainly good enough to convey the meaning of a sentence. And that accuracy should only improve with time and usage.

• Skype's iOS and Android apps now let you video chat with 24 other people