Features

Usability

Whether you create a text from scratch or use one of the many templates included, Microsoft Word will help you with a wide array of tools: tables, text formatting options, color schemes, support to insert images and clipart and more. Microsoft Word also includes a powerful spellchecker and tools to revise documents with marked text and personal notes. Support for video, however, is still missing.

Quality

In all, Microsoft Word proves to be an excellent tool for text processing, from a simple note to a complex report with images, graphs and tables.

Conclusion

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Microsoft Office Word Viewer is a handy tool that lets you view or print any Microsoft Word document quickly, without having to install Microsoft Office in its entirety.

After a simple install process, run Microsoft Office Word Viewer and you're presented with an Open File dialog window. Remember: you can't create, change or save any document in Microsoft Office Word Viewer. Select your chosen file (the viewer supports DOCX files via a converter, as well as older DOC and other formats).

Upon opening your document, you'll see that Microsoft Office Word Viewer displays just as it would in the original Microsoft Word, only without any of the editing tools. This means that you can see editorial notes and changes, if they have been tracked on the document. Additionally, you may access the file's properties window which will display statistics and authorship information, along with other details.

While you cannot export or save any document from Microsoft Office Word Viewer, you do have two options for obtaining a copy of the text. You may either print the document (which works just as well as printing from the full version of Word), and you're also allowed to copy the text and paste it into another application.

In all, Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2007 is a small and useful free download for viewing Microsoft Word documents. While it has no editing functions, it lets you read documents from any version of Microsoft Word with ease.

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What's new in Office 2013?

Microsoft Office 2013 is by no means a revolutionary update to the venerable office suite but this is the first version of Microsoft Office that has good cloud integration and a touch-friendly interface.

SkyDrive will be the backbone of Microsoft Office 2013. Settings, documents, templates, and even custom user dictionaries will all be synced to the cloud so that you have a consistent Office experience on whatever device, wherever you are.

There are also new social features shown in Microsoft Office 2013 including automatic picture importing from services like Facebook and Flickr. Easier sharing also brings along easier collaboration. Users can now hold a multi-person video conference while editing a single document.

What you get inside Office 2013

PowerPoint 2013

PowerPoint will also feature full stylus support to make giving presentations easier. Users can annotate their slides instantly. There's also a great new feature where the presenter can have notes on his or her screen but only have the main slide open on the audience's screen.

Outlook 2013

One of the more impressive features that was built into Outlook 2013 is its ability to intelligently suggest events and appointments. Outlook will detect when someone wants to create an appointment by looking for locations, time, and specific keywords. This makes adding events to your calendar much easier.

Last but not least, Microsoft also announced powerful developer tools to create plugins for Outlook. They demoed a fully interactive Bing map within a body of an email, without having to jump into a browser.

Word 2013

OneNote 2013

Excel 2013

Installation issues

Installation of Microsoft Office 2013 can be a bit of a pain on Windows 7. The Office 2013 preview downloads as an image file, which will need to be burned to a disc or you'll need a drive virtualization tool like Daemon Tools to create and mount the image. Windows 8 users will not have to worry about this as the operating system includes a disc virtualization tool.

Compatibility concerns

Microsoft Office 2013 creates a nice ecosystem for those already using their office suite but it may not be enough to woo users from other services or applications that are free. Microsoft also announced that Microsoft Office 2013 will only be compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8. XP and Vista users will be left out in the cold.

Conclusion

While Microsoft Office 2013 received some nice updates, there was nothing revolutionary that was announced. Microsoft played the catch-up game with Microsoft Office 2013, giving its office suite many features its competitors like Google Drive and Apple Mail have had for a while.

Overall, Microsoft Office 2013 offers some huge improvements over its previous versions with great cloud and touch features but this may not be enough for it to say as the king of office suites.

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In other words, Microsoft SkyDrive works like Dropbox. It's like an online hard drive with which you can synchronize the files stored on your PC so you can access them wherever you are. To be flexible, Microsoft SkyDrive offers complementary Mac, iOS and Android apps. To access your files when you're away from your PC, you just access your Windows Live Skydrive account, part of the Windows Live family.

Microsoft SkyDrive is a very easy to use. When you install it on your computer, it will create a folder called Microsoft Skydrive on your system. This folder is the shared one, so you need to put a copy of all the items you want to access in here. It comes with a few example documents so you can get to grips with the system easily, but it's really very, very simple. Once you've put the documents in the folder, they'll be accessible from any PC that you sign into with your Skydrive account.

Microsoft SkyDrive offers a generous amount of online storage, and excellent integration with Windows Live. These factors combine to make it a pretty strong tool. There aren't really any "configuration" options to speak of, but if you want to access your PC from your Microsoft SkyDrive account (i.e. from a different PC), you'll need to get a special code. Once you get the code, however, simple remote operations are easily done.

Bear in mind that Microsoft SkyDrive offers a default 7GB of storage. If you're already a Skydrive user, however, you're entitled to 25GB for free, which you can enable via your Microsoft Live SkyDrive account. It's very quick and takes literally one click.

In version 17, Microsoft added selective syncing so you can choose what files you want to sync instead of syncing everything within your SkyDrive folder. This brings SkyDrive up to speed with competitors like Dropbox and Box.

In all, Microsoft SkyDrive is an excellent app. It's clean, quick and easy to use, as well as offering 25GB of free online storage.

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Using this PDF app couldn't be simpler - open the PDF you want to use, and use the tabs across the top to view, edit, comment and more. You'll be able to add bookmarks, make comments, view in different layouts and more. Soda PDF also lets you make more substantial edits, changing text, adding images and more.

If you want to create PDFs with Soda PDF, you won't have a problem. You'll be able to create from a completely blank page, a form template or even convert from a variety of other document formats. Once excellent Soda PDF feature is the ability to import and convert documents to PDF in batch.

You'll also be pleased to see that Soda PDF has good security functions, allowing you to encrypt you PDF or set a passwords and different levels of editing privileges.

In all, Soda PDF is a complete PDF tool, but even so, it pales slightly against competitors such as Foxit PhantomPDF. There's nothing very wrong with it, but it does feel less polished and the interface - which doesn't have a right-click function - feels a little less intuitive.

Although not at the top of its game, Soda PDF is a solid PDF creation suite.

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Email clients have suffered a steep decline in recent times, mainly thanks to the rise of safe, attractive and reliable online alternatives. Microsoft Outlook has been among the losers, but 2010's version looks to be a step in the right direction.

Visually, Microsoft Outlook is clean, crisp and clear. It's very easy to find your way around: the ribbon interface makes finding features easy, while Account Information provides a very simple interface to manage accounts, settings and more.

In addition to multi-account email support, Microsoft Outlook also features Calendar, Tasks and Contact tools, all equally easy to use. Adding to functionality is a powerful search function, while various add-ins (to be downloaded separately) give you messaging, Hotmail, and social network functionality.

For high-volume users, Microsoft Outlook also hides a number of features that make handling lots of emails much easier. From Conversation View and inbox management tools, to extra right-click functionality and Mail Box Cleanup, it should be easier than ever to keep your email under control.

For users of mail client software, Microsoft Outlook is attractive, flexible and efficient - in other words, it's a very good bet.

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With spreadsheet sharing, Microsoft Excel is the ideal way of sharing, managing and analyzing information. This version of Microsoft Excel has improved access across the board, from a cleaner interface to better usability. The ribbon-like interface caused controversy when it was first introduced, but it's much easier to navigate for beginners, since you can now see all the options instead of having them hidden away in menus.

That's not to say the application has become any simpler to learn to use. Microsoft Excel is still a bit intimidating for beginners, although luckily it comes with tons of templates that help users get a better handle on it. One of the best new features it comes with allows you to restore spreadsheets you've accidentally closed. Consequently, it's now much easier to correct mistaken actions. The graphs and graphics you can add to your tables are also much improved.

Sharing data is easy as well, since you can use the Microsoft Excel web app, which allows any invited people to view or edit your spreadsheets. There are even mobile versions so you can access your spreadsheets on the move.

Microsoft Excel sets the standard in spreadsheet software. It comes as part of Microsoft Office 2010, which also includes other leading apps such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. It is incredibly powerful, and while there is a lot to learn in order to get the most out of it, anyone will be able to produce very attractive presentations with the data they enter into Excel spreadsheets.

Microsoft Excel 2010 is essential for many people at work, and there isn't a better spreadsheet application available.

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Using Microsoft Office OneNote feels very much like working with a regular notebook, and the interface adopts a very natural approach. You can click anywhere on the page and start typing.
OneNote instantly inserts a box around what you're typing, into which you can insert items such as audio, links, sound, documents, email addresses and more.
You can pick things up and drag them to anywhere on the page.
Improving your productivity
It takes a while to find your feet with Microsoft Office OneNote because of the sheer scale of the app.
There are plenty of useful productivity-enhancing tools to discover, though. For instance, you can draw onto your documents using pens and highlighters, and clip snippets from web sites to insert into your notes.
You can tag notes with all manner of preset tags, which compliments Microsoft Office OneNote's powerful search functionality.
Managing your notebooks with Microsoft Office OneNote is very straightforward.
You can create multiple notebooks, allowing you to have separate ones for work, home or studies. These show up in the form of tabs running down the side of the page.
Each notebook in Microsoft Office OneNote can be divided into as many sections as you like, which take the form of differently colored tabs above the page.

Sharing your notes
The sharing capabilities of Microsoft Office OneNote are excellent. You can sync the documents online and share them with friends, colleagues or business associates (even if they don't have OneNote installed).
Furthermore, the application can be synced with Microsoft Outlook to schedule tasks in your calendar of time-related documents you've created.

Microsoft Office OneNote borrows the impressive spelling and grammar checking from Word, and it also allows you to translate highlighted text.
A thesaurus is available in English, French, German, Arabic, Spanish and Dutch.
Don't be put off by the daunting nature of the app.

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