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There’s much more to Microsoft’s cloud service OneDrive (https://onedrive.live.com) than storage space. Your OneDrive account integrates automatically with Office Online (https://office.live.com), a free, slimmed-down version of Office 365 (£7.99 a month, bit.ly/Office).

Once you’ve signed up for, then into, OneDrive, you won’t have to open Office Online in a separate tab or window. Just click ‘+Create’ at the top left of the OneDrive window and choose a file (‘Word document’, ‘Excel workbook’ and so on). Any work you do saves to your OneDrive account, automatically and instantly. So if your internet suddenly dies on you, your work is safe.

OneDrive gives you 15GB free the moment you sign up, which is pretty generous (Dropbox only gives you 2GB free). But you can double that to 30GB by installing OneDrive on your tablet or phone  (Android bit.ly/1GHueNc iOS apple.co/1FAKJ9K) and switching on Camera Backup.

Besides expanding your storage, Camera Backup automatically saves all your device’s photos and videos to your OneDrive account. By default, it only does this via Wi-Fi, to avoid landing you with a huge mobile-data bill.

Be aware that if you’ve already enabled your Camera Backup bonus using one device, you won’t get it again by enabling it on a different device. Also note that the recent stories about OneDrive offering 100GB to anyone switching from Dropbox had prohibitive strings attached: the offer was US-only and it has expored.

If your internet connection goes down a lot, install OneDrive on your PC (1drv.ms/1dfLKxv for Windows 7 and 8; it’s pre-installed in Windows 8.1). Now, any work you do in Office Online is not only saved to OneDrive online, but also to the OneDrive folder on your computer.

As long as you have Office installed, simply click the file and it’ll open in your installed version of Word or Excel. Any changes you then make are saved to your OneDrive account the next time you go online. can also create new text snippets and save them for later. Save.Me also has a unique Logbook View, which organises clips by date, as well as a useful Research View with customisable columns displaying headings such as Topic, Date, Content and more. Like Ditto, it stores clips even after you turn off your PC.

OneDrive’s PC version syncs all your OneDrive files to your PC by default. Frankly, that’s daft. The whole point of cloud storage is to give you extra room for your files. To change this, right-click the OneDrive cloud icon in your system tray (you’ll need to have the PC version installed and be signed in), click Settings, then ‘Choose folders’. Instead of ‘All files and folder on my OneDrive’ (default). click ‘Choose folders to sync’ and untick any folders you don’t want to sync.

IFTTT (https://ifttt.com) lets you automate rules for various tools. You can tell it to save all incoming Gmail attachments to a OneDrive folder (ift.tt/1SJwWHu). First, you have to create a free IFT'TT account, then click Activate in the link above (to connect IFTTT to OneDrive), then Yes and Done (to confirm). Finally, click Add Recipe. There are are dozens more Recipes for  OneDrive at ift.tt/1SJwWHu.