Your visual guide to MS Office 2013

  [caption id="attachment_21366" align="alignnone" width="150"] Microsoft Office 2013[/caption] The last update to MS Office happened in 2010. The next one is slated for this year. The new version, called Office 2013, is already available as a preview. Here's a look at the radical changes incorporated into this new productivity suite... Metro in Office One of the biggest visual changes in Office 2013 is its 'flat' design, with no 3D effects to distinguish clickable buttons from the background. This gives Office 2013 a very stark and clean look. The ribbon interface that debuted with Office 2007 is part of the new suite. But if you don't like it, you can hide it: A full screen mode, which hides all distractions (except for the cursor), is a new addition to Office 2013. Overall, the new suite looks great, gelling well with Windows 8, which features single-toned two dimensional tiles. Getting used to the new interface, however, may take a week or two. Offline or online, Office everywhere Office 2013 features stellar online support. When you install the suite and fire it up for the first time, it asks you to log in using your Microsoft account. Once you have logged in, it connects to your SkyDrive account - Microsoft's cloud storage service - and uses it to save and sync your office documents. The benefits of Office's integration with SkyDrive are many... It allows users to back up their files on a remote server (so you still have a copy in case of a hard drive crash, or if your laptop is stolen). Online storage also means that you can access files from any computer, smartphone or tablet. These files are opened in Office web apps, which provide almost all the features of the installed version. Besides, online and offline integration also allows you to save your Office settings in the cloud. This means if you need Office 2013 on a public computer, you can get it if the computer is running Windows 7 or Windows 8 after enabling a feature called Office On Demand. It should be noted here that this feature requires a good internet connection. Outlook can now connect to a social networking website and track updates from your virtual buddies on Facebook or Twitter. Skype comes to Office Skype, the popular video and voice calling service that was bought by Microsoft in 2011, has been integrated with Office 2013. This means you can now call your co-workers by merely clicking a button in Outlook. Calling from one Skype account to another is free, but if you want to call a cell or landline number you have to pay extra. Microsoft is promising 60 minutes of free Skype calls every month to Office 2013 users. Two flavours Office 2013 will come in two flavours - the Standalone version and Office 365. While the former will require you to pay a one-time charge, Office 365 comes with a yearly subscription fee. For individual users, the standalone version will be limited to use on a single machine. Office 365 version, however, will support five machines. Share and embed  Office 2013 treats the web like a local hard drive from where content can be easily embedded into documents or from where files can be easily accessed. A user can share documents directly from Word, Excel and PowerPoint, either by sending other people the SkyDrive link for that file or by emailing it to them. If you want to publish a post to your blog, you can do that too by integrating your blogging account. The new Office 2013 supports services like Blogger and Wordpress, among others. As far as embedding is concerned, you can embed videos from websites like YouTube and images from picture hosts like Flickr, without downloading the content onto your local hard drive. PDF editing and Read mode Office 2010 allowed users to save Word documents as PDF files. Office 2013 now adds the support to open PDF files and edit them. In our use, Office 2013 handled simple PDF files with ease. But it was not so smooth with complex ones that had many images and elements. The 'Read' mode has been designed keeping in mind tablets and smartphones. Once you select this mode, the document is converted into a typical book page, making it easier to access it on a tablet or smartphone. Some neat improvements Word and PowerPoint feature a mode called web presentation that allows users to share a link through which they can broadcast their file/presentation on the web. PowerPoint gets Presenter View (see below) that allows a user to review the next slide in advance before showing it to audience on the large screen. PowerPoint and Word now come with a new 'Resume' feature. With this, when you close a slideshow or a document, it remembers the position you were at. Open the file again, and the software takes you to the position you were at when you closed it. If you use the online version to sync files on different devices, you can close a document on your workplace PC, and then seamlessly resume editing it from your PC at home. Outlook features a new tool called Peek. Hovering over Mail or Calendar provides a quick preview of information in these apps. In Excel, a new feature called Flash fill reformats data automatically based on how you use the cells and auto-completes the remaining entries without needing a formula. Microsoft gives an example of a list that contains email ids with a pattern of 'firstname.lastname'. Once a user fills two or three email ids, the others are automatically prepared by Flash fill and the blank slots in front of each name are automatically populated. Word has a feature called Object Zoom (see below) that allows a user to click on an embedded image or video and see it in bigger size in a floating window. Try before you buy Given the changes it packs, it is a good idea to try Office 2013 before you buy. The Consumer Preview version is available at www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en. Log on to the website using your Microsoft account, select the kind of computer you have (64-bit or 32-bit ) and download the installer. If 64-bit or 32-bit is Greek to you, don't worry. Just select the default 32-bit option. What if you don't want Office 2013  MS Office is popular but it is also costly. What if you just want a basic text editor and don't want to spend too much money on programs and features you won't even use? Earlier, there were not many choices. But now there are some pretty 'good enough' alternatives out there. If you just want the basic office functionality, take a look at Libre or Open office. Both are free and work as well as MS Office for most of the basic tasks. In case you want the office functionality as well as features like cloud storage, take a look at Google Docs or Zoho. If you are on a Mac computer, Apple's iWork productivity suite, which has applications like Pages and Keynote, is a good choice. Source: TOI