Office 2013 and Office 365: Hands On

Microsoft's new suites are touchscreen ready and cloud friendly, with some smart tweaks.

MICROSOFT’S NEW Offices, 2013 and 365, add some bold twists to the franchise, deliv­ering smart updates to Word, Outlook, and Excel. Most sig­nificantly, the revised suites embrace the mobile world and the cloud, deeply inte­grating with Microsoft's Sky- Drive service and promoting collaboration via the com­pany's recent acquisitions Skype and Yammer. (See page 68 for more on the cloud.)

Office 2013 and Office 365 deliver a very similar user experience, but Microsoft is clearly steering its custom­ers toward the cloud-based version. For the first time, the company is marketing Office 365 to consumers, and not strictly to businesses. Micro­soft hasn’t yet announced pricing for either product.

Though the user interface in Office 2013, like the one in Office 2010, puts the Ribbon front and center, the text and icons in the Ribbon are larger and more widely spaced.

Cool Word Features Microsoft has improved Word 2013 in lots of useful ways.

You can now import a PDF directly into Word, edit it as a Word doc, and then save it as a Word doc or a PDF. Im­ported files retain the origi­nal documents’ formatting- including headers, columns, and footnotes and you can edit elements such as tables and graphics in Word as such.

Import a PDF file contain­ing a table, and you can edit the table as though you had created it in Word from the outset. You can also embed a PDF file in a Word doc.

You can connect to online resources and bring them into documents. For example, you can use Bing to search the Web for a video, without leaving Word, and embed the HTML code for that video in your document.

Link your SkyDrive account to your Flickr account, and you can jump to your online photo collection and embed images directly in the docu­ment without leaving Word.

To embed a screenshot from an app on your PC, click Insert ► Screenshot, and a window with thumb­nails of every window open on your desktop will become visible. Click the image you want, and it will appear wher­ever your cursor is. And text automatically reflows around the image in real time.Tracking the changes that each person makes is critical to a collaborative document; this is much easier to do in Word 2013, with the "simple markup view" feature.

A red vertical line in the left margin indicates that the document contains changes; a word balloon in the right margin signals a comment. Click the vertical line to show edit changes and comments; click the word balloon to dis­play comments only.

A new viewing mode called Reader marks each para­graph with a small triangle. Click the triangle after read­ing its associated paragraph, and the paragraph will col­lapse, making additional text visible with far less scrolling.

Meet Excel 2013....

Like the new Word, Excel 2013 feels fresh yet com­fortingly familiar. Among its new features is Flash Fill. If you take a data element from one column and repeat it in a second column, Flash Fill will predict that you in­tend to do the same thing for every other value appearing in the first column, and will offer to fill in the second col­umn for you accordingly.

Excel 2013’s new Quick Analysis tool employs colors and symbols to identify and highlight trends and chang­es. Instead of looking at rows and columns of gray numbers, you can use Quick Analysis to transform your aggregated data into a spreadsheet formatted with color scales, bars, and icons.

Charts and graphs provide another convenient way to visualize data, and Excel 2013's new Quick Analysis tool will automatically sug­gest the most appropriate types of graphs—bar, pie, scatter, and so on—for a par­ticular purpose, based on the data set that you select.