by Jeremy Miller, Technician
The arrival of the new Office Suite is upon us. There are myriad of new features and experiences in Office 2013.
A new Office suite means there are upgrades, new features and tools to learn the locations of. Thankfully Microsoft has done their homework before putting out this Edition of Office.
Microsoft Office will be released later this month. Microsoft has paid attention to what customers want while developing this suite without sacrificing what they need.
Microsoft has mildly changed the user interface to a “Windows 8 Style theme with the option to make slight customizations to make your Office experience more personal.
Office will be available in either a local installation or through Microsoft’s Office 365 service for a monthly fee.
Microsoft has integrated the ability to sign in directly to Office using your Microsoft Account credentials.
This is one of the ways that Microsoft has integrated Office with the cloud. Logging into Office allows you to save any file from Office directly to your Microsoft SkyDrive with the cloud-storage included with all Microsoft Accounts.
You can also add additional locations for online storage or share your documents directly to social sites like: Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Another new aspect of Office is the ability to integrate apps into all products in the Office suite.
You may have been familiar with this feature if you have used Outlook 2010. You may now add apps to one of the programs in the Office 2013 suites.
Also when you launch any one of the programs in the Office suite you will now open a landing page that will ask you what type of document that you wish to create from a blank document to anyone of the many templates included.
Microsoft has released the Application Programming Interface (API) for Office 2013, this will allow software developers to write applications that will integrate directly into Office.
This will give you the ability to customize Office to any company’s specific needs. The developer then has the ability to publish and sell their apps on the Office and SharePoint store.
This gives Office 2013 a flexible lifecycle since the software will be constantly growing and integrating new useful features.
In Office 2013 there is a tool available to measure your usage across the entire Office suite. This will be useful if you need to identify the most used solution or to create macros to increase the workflow that a user can handle.
One of the largest improvements in Office is within Word. Microsoft has finally included in its own software the ability to read, modify and create Protected Document Files (PDF). Until now you were required to download a PDF reader such as Adobe Reader to view PDF files.
Office has been modified to create a more stable user experience. Since you now sign into Office it will remember your preferences, settings, and files.
This will make your Office experience similar on every computer or device that you use. As long as you have saved your documents to the cloud you will be able to access them from any computer with an Internet connection.
If you are interested in upgrading to Office 2013 then please contact us. We can give you a better idea if upgrading is the best option for you or your organization. We can also help you plan and implement the migration if you choose to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2013.