Moving the Microsoft Office suite a step forward, Office 2013 presents an evolutionary update to arguably the worlds most used business software. The enhancements don’t shock the system (like the migration from Windows 7 to Windows 8) but rather improve upon an already solid foundation and improving it. Here’s a look at 5 new features we didn’t know we needed but are sure glad they came along.
Mobile Device Support
With tablets and mobile devices encroaching on the workplace, Office 2013 is ready to go with it’s new mobile support. Enable this mode by heading over to the Quick Access Toolbar and selecting Touch Mode. Now you can use standard touch gestures within Office 2013 and Windows 8. Also, the position of the tabs and ribbons expands slightly to make them even easier to select through touch.
SkyDrive Integration
With Microsoft confirming that their popular SkyDrive service now has over 200 million users, it made perfect sense to integrate this 7 gigabytes of free cloud storage into Office 2013 -and that’s what they did. By unifying the location where documents are stored, accessing them from desktops, laptops, tablets and even phones had just become the new defacto standard in working with business files. Fast and easy to use, the inclusion of SkyDrive makes Office 2013 a very flexible suite well suited for the enterprise.
Editing PDF Documents
Despite Word’s popularity, there’s no denying that the PDF file type is equally if not more popular. Through several versions of Word the capability has existed to create PDF documents. Now Word 2013 gives you the opportunity to edit them as well. Though overdue as a feature in Word, it’s easy to use and thankfully works great.
New Licensing Options
It may not sound like a big deal but it is. Subscription based licensing offers an affordable way to own Office 2013. But even better, the subscription model offers Office to be installed on 5 devices with a single license. For those who prefer the traditional license model, this still exists and depending on your usage may better of as an overall value. Microsoft expert Paul Thurrott offers a nice breakdown of the costs to own the Office 2013 suite.
New Image and Video Management
If you have used Office for quite some time than you may have heard of the Clip Art gallery. So do you use it? Few people do. Instead, if you need to find an image to put in your document, a quick trip over to Bing or Google would be an easy alternative. To make life easier, applications like Word 2013 are now allowing integration with social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr and video sites like YouTube. No need to leave the application, just add your graphics and videos from within Office and keep right on working.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see a lot of these features in action? Keep an out for the new series from ClipTraining “What’s New in Office 2013”. We’ll let you know as soon as it releases.