April 18, 2013

Microsoft Office 2013 Review

Microsoft Office 2013

New version delivers touch-screen, cloud, mobility, and dozens of functional enhancements.

By J. Carlton Collins, CPA
April 2013
Microsoft Office 2013An essential tool for many CPAs is a dependable computer running Microsoft Office. Accordingly, CPAs have more than a passing interest when Microsoft releases new editions every three years or so. This year should be no exception.
With Office 2013, Microsoft has made major modifications related to new touchscreen capabilities, cloud connectivity, and a new subscription pricing plan. In addition, Office 2013 delivers a multitude of application enhancements, many of which are listed in Exhibit 1. This article explores new Office 2013 features that affect CPAs and provides guidance on whether you should upgrade (see sidebar “Upgrade Advice for CPAs”).
Exhibit 1: Selected New Features in Office 2013





New Global Features in Office 2013

1. Touch-Screen Enabled
2. Windows 8-Style Tiles
3. Cloud Enabled
4. Office 2013 Web Apps
5. Subscription Pricing

New Features in Excel 2013
6. Quick Analysis
7. Flash Fill
8. PowerView
9. New PivotTable Tools
10. Improved Functionality When Opening New Excel Windows
11. Recommended PivotTables and Charts
12. New Chart Controls
13. Get a Link
14. Publish Excel Data to Social Media

New Features in Word 2013
15. Open and Edit PDF Files in Word
16. Threaded Review Comments
17. Read Mode With Page Turning
18. Alignment Guides
19. Placeholder

New Features in Outlook 2013
20. Improved Menu Design
21. Navigation Bar
22. Centralized, Cloud-Based Email Through Outlook.com
23. Reading Pane Utility
24. Expanded Contact Capabilities
25. Improved Calendar Sharing
26. Calendar-Based Weather Reports
27. Social Media Integration

New Features in PowerPoint 2013
28. Improved Presenter View
29. New Presenter Tools
30. New Touch-Screen Gestures
31. New Review Tools
32. Present Slideshows Online for Free
33. New Themes
34. More Templates
35. New Transition Effects
36. Smart Guides
37. Merge Shapes
38. Auto-Detect Projector
39. Motion Path Ghosts
40. Eyedropper

NEW GLOBAL FEATURES IN OFFICE 2013
Office 2013’s ribbons look and work almost exactly like Office 2007/2010’s ribbons, resulting in only a minor learning curve. Office 2013 provides new controls for launching and using the applications on touch-screen devices, but the 2010-style ribbon, combined with a standard keyboard and mouse, remains the primary means for operating Office.
On mobile devices, Office 2013 sports the same familiar ribbons, but they have been redesigned to fit smaller tablet and smartphone screens. Most of Office’s new touch controls work similarly to mouse clicks, but gesture recognition has been added. For example, you can navigate Excel workbooks or Word documents by swiping your finger across the screen. You can also pinch and spread your fingers to shrink or enlarge spreadsheets, documents, or presentations. A new Touch Mode button inserts more space around the ribbon’s icons for easier finger operations on smaller touch-screen devices.
Office’s new square, color-coded tiles are used to launch applications on Windows 8 tablets, smartphones, and computers equipped with touch-screen monitors. The tiles can be resized and rearranged, and the color-coded schemes make it slightly easier to identify and select the correct application (see Exhibit 2). 





Office 2013 provides new cloud connectivity, including a free SkyDrive account (with as much as 25 gigabytes of free, initial storage) for securely saving your files to the cloud for access from any computer or device you use. Depending on your purchase option, you can also run Office apps from the cloud, again from any computer or device you use. If you’re not yet ready for the cloud, don’t fret. You can still run Office 2013 applications from your computer and store all data files locally. Beyond these global product enhancements, many new features have been added to the applications, as described below.
NEW FEATURES IN EXCEL 2013
Of all the Office 2013 applications, Excel benefits from the most impressive enhancements. Excel’s new Flash Fill watches you work and applies logic to help you complete tasks. Let’s assume that you have a list of 44 first and last names in column A, as shown in Exhibit 3, and you want to separate them into columns B and C. As you start typing the first name of the second record in column B, Excel’s Flash Fill guesses what you are trying to do and offers to fill in the remaining 42 first names (as shown in gray text).





Excel’s new PowerView inserts new worksheets connected to your data, then enables you to create new report types, such as the interactive map shown in Exhibit 4. The resulting PowerView Map report is zoomable, and filters can be applied to display portions of the data.





PowerView worksheets can be published as stand-alone, interactive reports to reporting service destinations such as Microsoft’s SharePoint PowerPivot Gallery. Some of the tools provided by PowerView are the ability to create a dashboard containing multiple PowerViews, apply themes and backgrounds, insert pictures and text boxes, insert collapsible and expandable tiles, and add data slicers. CPAs who work with PivotTables likely will appreciate Excel’s new Timeline Slicer, which helps users slice and dice Pivot data that contain dates. For example, selecting the dates May through October on the Timeline Slicer adjusts the PivotTable to display May through October data. (Editor’s note: PowerView and PowerPivot are available only via a multilicense Office Professional Plus or stand-alone Excel 2013 agreement or an Office 365 business subscription plan. For more on Office 2013 pricing plans, see the sidebar “Office 2013: Rent or Buy?”)
As an advanced enhancement, Excel provides a Create Relationships tool (previously available when working in PowerPivot) for building table relationships in workbooks that contain two or more tables sharing at least one common field name.
Once relationships have been established, the More Tables option allows you to add data fields from multiple tables to PivotTables.
Another PivotTable enhancement involves drillability. Previously, users could only drill down on PivotTable data to view underlying details, but now you can also Drill Up to view summary information and Cross Drill to view connected data contained in related tables.
Excel offers new tools that analyze data and recommend PivotTable and Chart layouts to best illustrate that data. Place the cursor anywhere in the data area and select Recommended PivotTables (or Recommended Charts) to return recommended PivotTable or Chart options.
Excel’s Quick Analysis tool also helps you analyze data more quickly by offering formats, charts, totals, tables, and Sparkline layouts to instantly summarize large volumes of data. When scrutinizing text-only data, Quick Analysis offers text-specific options for highlighting duplicate or unique text items.
Some changes simplify basic Excel tasks, making it quicker and easier to work with the application. For example, in edit mode, Excel no longer displays an apostrophe in front of the cell contents, which allows you to edit the beginning content of a cell without having to right-arrow past the apostrophe. This may be a small change, but in practice you’ll likely find that it simplifies the editing process more than expected.
Users with multiple monitors may appreciate that Excel now opens each workbook in a separate instance of Excel, making it easier to position separate workbooks on separate monitors. Further, copy-pasting formulas between workbooks opened in separate instances now yields intact formulas, instead of formula values.
Clicking on a chart in Excel pops up new chart controls allowing you to quickly apply predesigned formats, apply data filters, and help tweak, redesign, and annotate a chart (see Exhibit 5).





More than four dozen new functions have been added to Excel, several of which are described in the sidebar “New Excel Functions of Note.”
Other noteworthy enhancements include browser settings for exporting worksheet data to the web; a button for inserting combination charts; an inquire add-in for reviewing design, function, and data dependencies; and abilities to embed worksheet data in a webpage; publish workbooks online through Microsoft Lync; view animations in charts; connect PivotTables to new data types (such as OData, Windows Azure MarketPlace DataMarket, and SharePoint data); create MDX queries against multiple sets of data; decouple PivotCharts so they stand alone; and compare two spreadsheets to display changes (similar to Word’s Compare tool).

New Excel Functions of Note
Microsoft added 50 new functions to Excel (increasing the number of functions to 450), and the following 12 new functions in particular will appeal to many CPAs.
1. ARABIC: Converts Roman numerals to regular numbers, for example V, IX, and XX are converted to 5, 9, and 20, respectively.
2. CEILING.MATH: This function can be used to round up a number to a specific interval, such as the nearest 99 cents, as shown in the image below.




3. DAYS: Calculates the number of days between two dates and times (this function is slightly easier than subtracting dates and rounding the difference).
4. FLOOR.MATH: Rounds numbers down to a specific interval and also can be used to round negative numbers toward zero, instead of toward a smaller number. For example, –8.5 can be rounded to –8.0 (instead of the –9.0 result delivered by the older Round function).
5. FORMULATEXT: Displays referenced formulas as text and can be used to improve formula reading, reviewing, and printing.
6. ISFORMULA: Returns the value TRUE if the referenced cell contains a formula.
7. ISOWEEKNUM: Calculates the week during the year in which a given date falls. As an example, I used this formula to determine that I was born in the 53rd week of 1959.
8. PDURATION: Returns the number of periods required by an investment to reach a specified value. For example, you could calculate that $1,000 invested at 6% APR would take 26.89 years to reach a value of $5,000. (This function approach is faster than constructing a 322-row table to calculate the result.)
9. RRI: This function returns an equivalent interest rate for the growth of an investment. For example, you could calculate that a $1,200 mutual fund investment that grew to $5,600 in 18 years earned an average return of 8.93%.
10. SHEET: Calculates the sheet number of the referenced sheet. For example, you might use this function to determine that the worksheet containing interest rate assumptions is entered on the 46th sheet in your workbook.
11. SHEETS: Calculates the number of sheets in a referenced range.
12. SKEW.P: Like the Skew function, SKEW.P calculates the standard deviation of a string of data, but it bases its calculation on the entire population instead of a sample of the population. This function could be used to determine whether each line item of a company’s historical financial statement data is consistent enough to use as a basis for projecting the following year’s budget.
For a complete listing of the 50 new functions in Excel 2013, visit carltoncollins.com/newfun.htm.

NEW FEATURES IN WORD 2013
Word has a number of PDF improvements that might interest the CPA community. When an unprotected PDF file is opened in Word, it instantly is converted to a Word format, ready for editing. Once you’ve completed your edits, you can save it as a Word document or back to a PDF format. Note: Microsoft cautions that PDF documents opened in this manner may contain minor formatting issues—for example, pages may not break exactly as they do in the original PDF file if the PDF document contains images, tables, or objects.
An improvement that reviewers should find useful is Word’s improved Track Changes format and threaded review conversations, which make it easier to follow the back-and-forth review comments.
Word’s improved Read Mode provides icons for turning pages with a tap of a finger on touch-screen devices, with a click of the mouse, or by rolling the mouse’s scroll wheel. Read Mode allows you to split a document into side-by-side pages or narrow columns to give documents the look and feel of a book—a format that better accommodates speed reading. Double-tapping or double-clicking any inserted object (tables, charts, pictures, and videos) expands them to full-screen size, and you can also stream videos within documents.
Other Word enhancements include vertical and horizontal alignment guides that pop up automatically when you move an image, object, or text box to help you snap them into place correctly on the first try. Cropping or resizing images using the mouse is improved to adjust images in one-pixel increments, rather than three. When you reopen a Word document, Word displays a placeholder tab containing a hyperlink for returning to the last position you were at when you closed the document, so you can quickly pick up where you left off.


NEW FEATURES IN OUTLOOK 2013
Windows PhoneIn a significant enhancement, Microsoft has rolled out Outlook.com, which provides cloud-hosted centralized email accessible from all of your computers and mobile devices. Outlook’s new touchscreen tile design and menus work well on smartphones (see screenshot at left).
Outlook’s look and feel has been improved in several ways. The screens and menus are cleaner, and a new Navigation Bar has been added at the bottom, providing quick access to Calendar, People, and Tasks. Outlook now provides a Quick Peek into the calendar, contact list, and tasks when you hover over these options.
Outlook’s new People Card can combine disparate sources of contact information (Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) into a single contact record and can also display social media status updates, pictures, and activity feeds from all your friends and followers. This enhancement enables you to view current social media content for senders or recipients as you read or compose email, perhaps helping you to remember the sender or include a congratulatory comment on the recipient’s new grandchild. This approach might help you keep up with your friends, colleagues, and connections solely from within Outlook. New features also allow you to flag, delete, mark, or reply to email messages directly from within the reading pane without opening the email, and you can share a mailbox folder with others, such as a project team.
New ActiveSync functionality connects Outlook to Outlook.com or Gmail automatically, without the need to download, install, and configure a complicated connector. This tool also syncs your Outlook.com or Gmail calendars, contacts, and other information associated with those accounts. Calendar Sharing offers new tools and a variety of new methods for sharing calendar details directly from within the calendar.


NEW FEATURES IN POWERPOINT 2013
PowerPoint’s Presenter View has a new look that privately displays teleprompter-style presenter notes, upcoming slides, a presentation timer (with a time restart button), zoom tools, markup tools, touchscreen controls, a stylus, and a touch-screen stylus. Additionally, the Presenter View no longer requires a second monitor for use; simply press Alt+F5 to run presenter view on a single monitor, as pictured in Exhibit 6.




When you are making a presentation, the new Slide Zoom allows you to double-click on an object or area in a presentation to temporarily enlarge it (pressing the Esc key returns the presentation to a normal view). The new Navigation Grid privately displays thumbnail images of all slides on the presenter’s screen. New touchscreen gestures such as swipe, tap, scroll, zoom, and pan can be used to present slideshows from your tablet, smartphone, or other touch-screen device. A welcome enhancement is the new Review Pane (see Exhibit 7), which features threaded comments and replies similar to those found in Word 2013.




PowerPoint enables you to present live online meetings free via Microsoft Lync, and this platform can now deliver live video and audio with slideshow presentations. Lync allows you to host an unlimited number of audience participants (in some versions), send invitations via email, mute audience members, block audience video, and hide names from other audience attendees. Another noteworthy improvement is Lync’s ability to seamlessly play slideshow-embedded video clips from within the presentation.
PowerPoint features more than a dozen new templates and themes, most of which are designed for the newer 16:9 (HD aspect ratio) widescreen monitors and flat screen TVs and projectors. There are 22 new transitions, including Paper Curl, Ferris Wheel, Orbit, Fly Through, Vortex, and Doors, to name a few.
On the slide master, alignment guides can be placed to ensure that slide elements are positioned consistently across all slides. A new option enables you to merge shapes to form a single shape, and text can wrap tightly to that new shape for a professional effect. Because PowerPoint is frequently used with a projector, Microsoft added improved capabilities that will not only detect the presence of a projector, but will also automatically adjust the video output size and resolution settings for optimum visibility. Creating motion paths for text boxes and objects is easier now with new ghost images that visually show the user where the animated objects will end in relation to their starting point (shown in the screenshot below).




PowerPoint also added a color Eyedropper that makes it easy to match colors (shown in the screenshot below).



Upgrade Advice for CPAs
CPAs have much to consider as they weigh a possible jump to Office 2013 (see the sidebar “Office 2013: Rent or Buy?”).
Technology leaders will likely embrace the new Office, while laggards will likely hold off as long as they can. Most CPAs fall in the middle, and in my view, upgrading to Office 2013 makes more sense for the following groups of CPAs:
1. CPAs on Windows 8, because Office 2013 is designed to work in the Windows 8 environment.
2. CPAs operating in the cloud, because Office 2013 provides new features and functions for accessing data in the cloud, running applications from the cloud, and sharing data through the cloud. There are caveats to this, however, which are covered in the sidebar “Office 2013: Rent or Buy?”
3. CPAs with touch-screen monitors, because Office 2013 is touch-screen enabled. (Please note that Office 2013’s touch-screen tiles will respond to mouse clicks, even in the absence of a touch-screen monitor.)
4. CPAs who want to use Office on their mobile tablets or smartphones, because Office’s new tile-based buttons, touch-screen controls, and phone-friendly menus help Office operate better on mobile devices.
5. CPAs on Office 2003 or earlier, because those editions of Office are well behind the times and Office 2013’s enhancements are sufficient to warrant an upgrade.
6. CPAs on Office 2010 or 2007 who find the new features essential, because Office 2013 includes many significant enhancements, just one of which could justify upgrading.
The following groups of CPAs may find staying on Office 2010 a reasonable strategy:
1. CPAs using Windows Vista or XP have no choice but to stay put because Office 2013 does not run on those platforms.
2. CPAs remaining on Windows 7, because Windows 7 does not support touch-screen, therefore Office 2013’s new tiles and touch-screen capabilities will be less meaningful.
3. CPAs who are satisfied with their current computer systems and are not yet ready to fully embrace the cloud, touch-screen monitors, tablets, or smartphones should probably hold off upgrading. If your systems and software are fairly current and working well, you need compelling reasons to justify the upgrade costs, installation effort, and inherent learning curve. If the cloud and mobile-device solutions and feature enhancements described herein aren’t compelling enough, then staying put may be a reasonable strategy for now.
In the final analysis, most CPAs won’t jump to the new technology right away—and rightfully so. It probably makes the most sense to upgrade to the latest editions of Windows and Office the next time your computers need replacing. However, tech-savvy CPAs should find enough new functionality to warrant transitioning to Office 2013 sooner rather than later.

Office 2013: Rent or Buy?
Microsoft provides three ways to acquire Office 2013.
1. Buy the boxed product, which comes in a cardboard box with a CD;
2. Purchase licenses, which include the product activation key only (purchasers of Office 2010 licenses with software assurance can upgrade to any of these three options for free, but they will need to choose one of the Office 2013 purchase options once their Office 2010 software assurance license expires);
3. Rent the product via an Office 365 monthly subscription plan.
Further complicating the pricing picture, Microsoft offers Standard, Professional, Professional Plus, Charity, tablet (RT), and multiple home, student, business, and academic editions of Office 2013, including editions bundled with added features (such as application roaming and automatic updates). The results are dozens of potential price points, but summarized in this chart are three options for purchasing one of the professional editions.
In the end, the core decision is whether to buy Office 2013 or rent it. Microsoft clearly wants users to choose a monthly subscription. In a significant change to the company’s prior pricing models, the boxed product and license options allow you to install Office 2013 on only one computer (or device), down from two or three in the past. In contrast, the subscription plan option allows you to install the product on as many as five computers (and/or devices). In addition, the subscription plan offers a number of additional cloud-based benefits (centralized email that automatically syncs with all of your devices, as much as 25 gigabytes of free storage on Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and web-based hosting).
Why is Microsoft pushing the subscription plans? Software publishers like rental plans because they produce a steady, ongoing revenue stream, whereas the sale of product upgrades every few years requires significant marketing effort and produces a revenue stream that ebbs and flows.
From the user’s perspective, there are advantages and disadvantages to the subscription plan, as follows:
Advantages to the Subscription Plan
  • With a single subscription plan, a user could install Office 2013 on multiple devices—such as his or her office computer, home computer, traveling laptop, tablet PC, and smartphone—and also access the web versions of Word, Excel, Publisher, and other Office applications.
  • The subscription plan provides a cloud-based email system that stores email messages, replies, contacts, tasks, and calendars in a central location so you can access them from any of your computers or mobile devices or via a web browser.
  • Data transfers from your computer to Microsoft’s cloud-based SkyDrive are securely encrypted, and your data remains encrypted in the cloud, where it is backed up automatically on a continuous basis and is protected by firewalls, anti-virus software, and intrusion monitoring solutions. A significant amount of technology, cost, and effort is needed to duplicate this level of security on a local computer or file server.
  • The subscription plan also includes as much as 25 GBs of free, initial storage space on SkyDrive, and you can also grant permission to others to access your SkyDrive files or folders, even if they don’t use Office. This facilitates file sharing and collaboration between CPA and client or colleague, or both.
  • In the cloud, email attachments are unnecessary because you can send file links instead of file attachments so emails travel faster and deliveries are no longer hung up because of attached file size restrictions.

Important note:
While the subscription plan does provide cloud-based Office applications and data storage in the cloud, you are not obligated to use these options. The subscription plan also enables you to install and run your applications locally, and all of your data files can be saved locally.

Disadvantages of the Subscription Plan
  • CPAs who choose to skip Office upgrades to save money won’t have that option under the rental plan.
  • CPAs who prefer to avoid the cloud will find the subscription plan’s data cloud-based functionality pointless.
  • CPAs who embrace the new cloud functionality face new risks. For example, the cloud adds a new layer of technology in which access to your applications and files depend upon the reliability of the internet.
  • Even with fast internet speeds, the Office 2013 web apps operate slower than locally installed applications.
  • Even though security is high for cloud-based data, careless use of your login password can easily expose your data.
  • Storing client data on SkyDrive could lead to compliance issues outlined in authoritative pronouncements such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and others.
  • Another significant concern relates to Microsoft’s Code of Conduct agreement (tinyurl.com/cu8f4l7), which prohibits uploading files that contain pornography, hate speech, junk mail verbiage, and numerous other types of content. Microsoft actively monitors the data files you upload, and in at least one case it suspended a user’s SkyDrive access after offending files were identified. To enforce this policy, Microsoft grants outside contractors access rights to user data that could create regulatory and privacy concerns.


OneNote 2013 enhancements
OneNote features a new splash screen; Note Sync between all of your devices (including Windows, Android, and Apple phones); drag and drop whole files; new inking tools for drawing, erasing, editing, and doodling; improved tables with shading, header rows, and data sorting; a mobile app for Android and Apple phones; a new radial menu for easier touch-screen access; touch, pen, or keyboard note-taking; the ability to send notes to a webpage; embed Excel workbooks or Visio diagrams; and search by author capability.
Access 2013 enhancements
Access 2013 offers improved relational and multi-table support including a multiple-table indicator for building true relational databases; views from one table automatically display data from related tables; related-item controls automatically summarize data from related tables and queries; drill-through clicks employ behind-the-scenes logic to display data from related sources.
In addition, there are new tools for building a browser-based database app, 2010 web-style database, or traditional desktop database; a browser-based database app automatically creates views and switchboards; new table templates; controls dragged and dropped onto views snap to layout guides automatically; hovering over callouts displays editable properties; and Access now supports three permission levels for author, developer, and reader.
Alternatives suites to Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office (priced starting at $119.99 or $15 per month) commands an estimated 90% to 95% of the U.S. application suite market. The top five alternatives to Microsoft Office are Corel’s WordPerfect Office (priced starting at $229); IBM’s Lotus SmartSuite (priced starting at $19.99); Oracle’s OpenOffice (free); Google Docs (free); and Google Apps for Business (priced starting at $5 per month).
How much should a new system cost?
Selecting a new computer system is confusing, and no one solution fits all. However, you may find it useful to consider the desktop system I use for comparison purposes. In January 2013 I purchased a new 64-bit, Windows 8 HP Envy computer for $849 (with 12 GB of RAM, running Intel Core i7-3770 at 3.40 GHz) and installed Office 2013 at a subscription cost of $20 per month. I kept my two 40-inch monitors ($299 each) and webcam ($50). I added QuickBooks Premier Accounts Edition ($20 per month), Adobe Acrobat XI ($119), Adobe Photoshop Elements ($71), Camtasia Studio 8 ($149), and Snagit ($39). The resulting computer system is fast and reliable, and all of my data and email messages are accessible from my office computer, home computer, laptops, tablet, and smartphone.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Office 2013 includes new touch-screen functionality and cloud-computing and mobile capabilities.
Microsoft has significantly reshaped its Office pricing plans to steer users to sign up for one of a multitude of subscription options. Subscription plans cover five PCs for users, while traditional licenses now cover only one.
Whether you jump from Office 2007/2010 to Office 2013 should be determined to a large extent by your current technology situation—which devices you own, which operating systems you use, and how comfortable you are with cloud-based data storage and file transfer.
Excel benefits from the most impressive set of feature enhancements in Office 2013. Chief among the new features are Flash Fill and PowerView.
Word improvements include the ability to edit PDF documents in Word and publish the changes as a PDF file.
New PowerPoint features include the power to zoom in on specific areas in slides during presentations.
The new Outlook.com greatly enhances Outlook’s ability to sync with both multiple devices and with multiple mail services.
J. Carlton Collins (carlton@asaresearch.com) is a technology consultant, CPE instructor, and a JofA contributing editor.
To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Jeff Drew, senior editor, at jdrew@aicpa.org or 919- 402-4056.

Source: http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2013/Apr/20137226.htm

April 12, 2013

Give Your Windows XP PC a fresh new Win8 Theme

Found a great new visual style for my aging Windows XP machine. The theme is called Modern XP 2.1. See my results below and a link where you can get it. Enjoy.









You can get the Modern XP Theme here: 

The Windows 8 standard desktop wallpaper can be found here:

http://wallpaperswide.com/windows_8_default-wallpapers.html






April 8, 2013

Alternatives to buying Office 2013


Have Office 2010? Don’t Buy Office 2013 – Here’s Why


don't buy microsoft office


I’m coming to the end of my trial period with Microsoft Office 2013. Over the weeks it has been a reasonably solid experience with one or two quirks causing me no end of frustration. But do I want to upgrade? Do I want to pay for a subscription or full purchase or would I prefer to stick with Microsoft Office 2010, a suite that I’ve been using successfully for several years now? Indeed, should I even think of abandoning Microsoft in favour of an open source alternative?
While I mulled these questions, I had a bit of a play with Office 2013. It soon became apparent that Microsoft seem to be playing a very interesting – and risky – game. Microsoft Office 2013 might have a new user interface and offer “new” features (see below) but all in all it is just the same package as released previously, plus a few free add-ons.
What this essentially means is that by adding free downloads from Microsoft to Office 2010, you can save hundreds of dollars.

Why You Think You Need Microsoft Office 2013

SkyDrive integration! New views in Excel and PowerPoint! Facebook integration with Outlook!
If any of those three things make you sit up and think “Hmm, I reckon I should be upgrading to Microsoft Office 2013″, then think again – if you’re running Office 2010, you already have these features included. Sure, there are a few new features in Office 2013, but on the whole these are nothing to write home about and certainly don’t justify an expensive upgrade from Office 2010 (except, perhaps, in extreme cases).
What has happened is that basically Microsoft have repackaged the existing Office suite with a new “Modern” user interface and integrated some features that were available via free downloads. Elsewhere, tools and functions that were overlooked in promotional campaigns for Office 2010 have not been highlighted.

Microsoft Outlook

For the past few months, Microsoft has been heavily promoting Outlook.com, its new online email, calendar, task management and contacts system that is available as a free upgrade to Hotmail users.
Not only is the name evocative of the famous email client, but so is the user interface – so much so, in fact, that for standard users it is more or less indistinguishable from the Microsoft Office 2013 tool of the same name.


don't buy microsoft office


If the basic features of Outlook.com aren’t enough, don’t worry – there are ways to get some of the added bells and whistles free, too, either in your browser or in your previous version of Office Outlook:
Weather alerts can be added in Options, where you can select and save Show weather on the calendar (in Celsius or Fahrenheit). Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can be integrated with Outlook.com by clicking your profile image in the top-right corner, selecting Edit Profile > Connect and adding your social accounts.
If you would prefer this feature in Outlook 2010 rather than having to use the browser email client, don’t worry – Microsoft Office Social Connector can be downloaded adding Facebook, LinkedIn and several other social networks to the email client.
Outlook 2013 offers a “new” feature that displays a one-line preview of each message in your inbox. This isn’t all that new, however. Simply a default setting and one that can easily be setup in Outlook 2010 in View > AutoPreview.

Microsoft Word

A new feature for Word 2013 is the ability to drop photos into Word documents and place them wherever you want. This DTP-esque function is complemented with the ability to annotate documents freehand with text and illustrations.


office 2013 bad


Earlier versions of Word don’t offer anything quite like this, although there are alternatives. If you’re running a previous version of Microsoft Office that has Publisher in the suite, then this is one application that already offers the DTP function. Meanwhile, Serif PagePlus Starter Edition is a free DTP application that enables you to import and edit .DOC and .DOCX files, place images wherever you like for the text to flow around and a pencil tool for annotations, much like in Word 2013.
The ability to edit PDF files is another big selling point of Office 2013, and this is one of the few genuine improvements. In Office 2010, only the ability to save a document in PDF was available.
If you want to be able to edit PDFs without upgrading to Word 2013, however, you can do so using CutePDF or PDFescape – the first enables the extraction of pages form a PDF document, along with other editing tools such as rotating, deleting and cropping pages, while the second provides tools for removing and adding page elements such as text, pictures, links and notes.
One of the best features in Word 2013 is the document bookmark, which enables you to quickly jump to the last viewed or edited page in a document. However, this is another tool that is available in Word 2010, and can be activated by manually inserting a bookmark – go to Insert > Bookmark, name the bookmark, then Location > Add. You can then jump to the bookmark via Insert > Bookmark > Go To.
Similarly, Word 2013 opens documents in Read Mode by default. Although frustrating for some, this can be activated in Word 2010 via View > Full Screen Reading.
Finally, multimedia options for Word documents have been improved in 2013, but they’re not all that bad in Word 2010, either. While Word 2013 supports importing images and videos from Bing, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, Word 2010 users can still embed JPG and PNG images via Insert > Picture – the image URL should be inserted into the File name box.
Meanwhile videos on your hard disk drive can be added to Word 2010 using Insert > Object > Create from file. If you want to add an online video you will need to download it first – this shouldn’t be too difficult as there are many ways in which you can download a YouTube video!

Microsoft Excel

With Excel 2013, the bonuses from a Microsoft sales department point of view all concern features that already existed in Excel 2010, namely filters and slicers.
You can easily add filters to your tables in Office 2010 via Data > Filter. To acquire more advanced options, meanwhile, you will need to first create a PivotTablet (this is done by selecting a cell in your worksheet and selecting Insert > PivotTable.) You can then filter your data using the PivotTablet arrows, and this can in turn be formatted into a chart via PivotTable Tools > Options > Pivot Chart.


office 2013 bad


It is from using the chart that you can enjoy the filter options, which can be viewed by clicking the chart. Elsewhere, slicers can be added via Insert > Slicer > Existing Connections > Show, where you will decide how the slicers should appear. Slicers enable you to filter PivotTable data, and are a particularly popular function among heavy spreadsheet users.

Microsoft PowerPoint

Two key features are being used to promote PowerPoint 2013. Presenter View is a tool for displaying speaker notes and enabling the annotation of slides as you conduct your presentation – but this is 
possible in PowerPoint 2010 with the Use Presenter View option in the Slide Show tab.


office 2013 bad


A feature of PowerPoint 2013 that isn’t available in 2010 is the ability to Present Online, an online streaming tool for your presentation. However, by signing up to Prezi, you can take advantage of a free service that enables online sharing and live presentation streaming.

Free Alternatives For OneNote

As good as OneNote is, it hasn’t made any considerable leaps and bounds in functionality since the last release. Indeed, you might prefer to avoid using anything other than the 2010 version as in most cases this will probably do what you want.
However if you want a better level of flexibility for searching notes and online sync, then you should probably be considering Evernote, the hugely popular app that is available for pretty much any platform you can think of. As an alternative, you might also want to take a look at Google’s new Keep app, which is based on the same premise.


office 2013 good or bad


On top of all of these options, there is also OneNote MX, the excellent Windows 8 version of the application which is arguably the most touch-optimised aspect of Microsoft Office. This is available free in the Windows 8 Store.

SkyDrive Integration Is Already Here!

One of the biggest selling points for Microsoft Office 2013 is the inclusion of SkyDrive integration – the only thing is, Microsoft seems to have omitted to inform its customers that this too was already available for free.


don't buy microsoft office


All you need to do is head to the SkyDrive download page and install the application, which will connect with your existing SkyDrive account (every Microsoft account has access to cloud storage). One installed, it will add a SkyDrive entry to Windows Explorer and whenever you click the Save as option (in Office or any other application) you will be able to save directly to the cloud, where your data will be available to view from another PC, through the web browser or via the SkyDrive mobile app.

Don’t Pay More Than You Have To

We’re not about to start prescribing financial advice concerning your software purchases or anything else, but you really should have a good think about upgrading to Office 2013 before you sign up to anything. Microsoft’s Office suite has served millions of people well over the years, but the differences between the new package and the old one – certainly in terms of regularly used features – are negligible.
Some of you might remember the observations back in 2009 (when Office 2010 was previewed) that the new release wasn’t all that different from the previous one. In my opinion, there were features worth paying for in Office 2010 even if you had Office 2007; this time around, however, it simply doesn’t make sense.

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/have-office-2010-dont-buy-office-2013-heres-why/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=2012-04-08

April 1, 2013

Review: Microsoft Excel 2013 from PCMag.com

By Edward Mendelson

 
Excel is the second-most widely used productivity app in the world, and it's second only to Microsoft Word. If you use Excel every day, but you don't need Word or Outlook or PowerPoint or the rest of the enormous toolbox that makes up Office 2013, you don't need to buy the whole Office suite. A long-standing but little-known option makes it possible to buy Excel alone. Just visit Microsoft's Office store, scroll down until you find the tiny icons that let you but the Office apps separately, and click on the icon that lets you buy Excel 2013 for $109.99. Just don't ask why Microsoft chose that price, because Microsoft isn't saying. It's a strange price, but for all the power the app offers, it's an excellent deal.




Excel 2013 deserves a longer and deeper look than we had room for in our write-up of the full Office 2013 suite, partly because Microsoft seems to have packed more new features and conveniences into Excel 2013 than into any of the other apps in the suite. Some of these new features add functions that Excel never had before, but most of them make it effortless to use features that took a lot of time, trouble, and expertise to use in earlier versions.


What's Obviously New


Some of the new features are obvious, such as the way Excel now opens multiple worksheets in separate Excel windows, each with its own ribbon interface, instead of as separate panes in a single Excel window sharing one ribbon. This makes it easy to manage different worksheets in a dual-monitor setup, while also bringing Excel into line with Word, which has used separate windows for separate documents for ages. Some are under the hood, including fifty new functions for use in formulas, including one that converts strings to numbers in a customizable way, so that "15%" appears as to "0.15" without requiring a trip to the "Format cell" dialog to change a cell's appearance.
Other new features streamline existing features, making it surprisingly easy for beginners to perform tasks that used to be limited to experts. When you select a block of data, a Quick Analysis icon appears at the lower right of the selection. Click on it, and Excel displays a gallery of suggested formatting, charts, totals, and much more. For example, as you move through the suggested choices, Excel displays a row or column of totals, running totals, averages, and other calculations based on the selected data.


Quick Analysis also suggests suitable charts, or custom formatting that color-codes the data, or displays icons in each cell indicating whether the number of greater or less than the preceding cell. The same gallery also suggests possible pivot tables for custom views of the data, making this feature more accessible than ever. All these various options were (and still are) available from the Ribbon if you had the knowledge and patience to find them, but now Excel goes out of its way to offer them. By the way, keyboard aficionados will be glad to know that the Quick Analysis gallery, like everything else in Excel, can be opened with a keyboard shortcut, in this case Ctrl-Q.


My favorite new feature, because it saves a tremendous amount of time-wasting effort, is called Flash Fill, and it's one of many features where Excel acts as it it's using its brain, not just its raw number-crunching power. If you have a column of first names and a column of last names, and you want a single column containing cells with a last name followed by a comma, then a first name. I used to accomplish this by copying the names into Word, combining them there by replacing tabs with commas, and then copying the results back into Excel. Now, all I need to do is go to the top row of the columns of names, containing, for example, "Arthur" and "Andersen," find an empty cell on that row, and enter "Andersen, Arthur". Then I start typing a similar combination of names on the next cell down, corresponding to the names in the second row, and Excel fills in that cell, and the whole rest of the column, with the combined names that I want. The filled-in data appears in gray until I click on an icon that invites me to confirm that I got the data I want.


You can use the same trick in reverse, too, extracting the first or last word from cells that contain multiple words, instead of combining multiple words into one cell. With some experimentation, you may find that Flash Fill is smarter than you expect. For example, if you have a column of dates such as "2012, 1995, 1987, 1990" and you enter "2000s, 1990s" in the column next to them, Excel will instantly suggest "1980s," and "1980s" to continue the series correctly.


What's Under the Hood


Some of Excel's best new features aren't visible in Excel itself because they exist only on the Web. One especially nifty feature lets you add a view-in-Excel button to almost any table that you want to include on a webpage. This can be a webpage on your own site or a blog or anywhere else. All you need to do is to visit Microsoft's site, click a few buttons to get the two chunks of HTML code that you need, and then paste that code above and below a table in a web page.


When you upload the modified page to your website, anyone who views it will find an "Excel Interactive View" button above the table. When a visitor clicks on the button, an active view of the table opens at the top of the browser window, completely, complete with charting options and pivot-table-style filters. Another button causes the table to open in the browser in the full Excel Web App interface—essentially a subset of Excel itself that runs in a browser. You don't even need to own a copy of Excel to use this feature, and it gives you a taste of what you'll get if you buy it.


Other Web-based features—which you'll need a fully copy of Excel to use—include the ability to specify which parts of a worksheet will be visible or editable when you post the whole file online so that it can be viewed in the Excel Web App. (A whole worksheet viewed in the browser is of course different from a simple HTML table on a web page viewed in Excel Interactive View.)
Another Web-based feature that requires a full desktop-based copy of Excel is real-time collaboration on worksheets stored on Microsoft's cloud-based SkyDrive service (available free with 7GB storage to anyone with a free Microsoft account, with 20GB added if you subscribe to the Office 365 service that installs a full copy of Office 2013 on up to five computers). Multiple collaborators can open the worksheet in their desktop copies of Excel, or in the Excel Web App, and edit different cells at the same time—with one major restriction: all the collaborators who edit the worksheet at the same time must be using either desktop Excel or the Excel Web App. Real-time collaboration won't work if some people are trying to use the Web App and others the desktop app at the same time. Other sharing features let you post a link on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter that opens a SkyDrive-stored, editable worksheet.


Adding On and Wishing for More


Excel 2013, like Word 2013 and Outlook 2013, supports plug-in modules that you can download from Microsoft's Office store. These are a mixed blessing. For example, Microsoft's answer to the real-time stock quotes available in Google Drive is a Bing Finance plug-in which works well with U.S.-traded securities but doesn't recognize many foreign firms and has limited options for creating a table of symbols and prices. When I inserted a table and then tried to remove one of its columns, Excel instantly crashed. After fifteen minutes, I clicked the Cancel on the message box that told me that Excel was trying to recover my data, and had to close Excel from the Windows Task Manager. This was one of the worst app crashes I've experienced in a long time. Knowing Microsoft, I'm sure they'll get this right eventually, but, meanwhile, if you want automatically-updated stock prices in a worksheet, you're better off with Google Docs, which makes this task almost effortless, or, for desktop apps, the Quattro Pro worksheet included in Corel's WordPerfect Office or (where it's a bit more harder to implement) the open-source LibreOffice suite.


Now that Excel includes the terrific new Flash Fill feature I have only one major complaint about the app. The Formulas tab on the Ribbon includes buttons labeled Trace Precedents and Trace Descendants; these buttons tell Excel to draw arrows pointing to or from the current cell, and indicating other cells on the same sheet from which the current cell got its data, or other cells that use the data in the current cell. If the linked data is on another sheet or another file, then the arrow points only to a tiny worksheet icon. If you click on the arrow that points to this icon, Excel displays a GoTo box that lets you jump to the other sheet—but when you do, you leave the sheet you started from. This made sense when screens were small and memory was limited, but everyone now has enough RAM and screen real estate to let Excel open a pane or window with an editable view of the linked sheet without closing the sheet you started from. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't provided this feature already.


Excellent Excel


After almost thirty years of development, Excel has almost every feature you can imagine even if they're not yet perfectly implemented. That doesn't mean it's the last word in data analysis. If you're a scientist or someone working in quantitative finance who uses enormous data sets or needs unlimited fine-tuning in your charts with access to every imaginable statistical tool, you'll need to roll up your sleeves and learn how to write scripts in the open-source R language. For graphics professionals, or users who want the prettiest possible tables, Apple's Mac-only Numbers app has options to create whole worksheets in boxes on a canvas, instead of each worksheet filling a separate page as in Excel and all other worksheet software.


The vast majority of users, however, will be happy with Excel, and Excel 2013 outclasses every other worksheet app in almost every way. It keeps getting more powerful, and it keeps getting easier to use, and you'll need strong reasons to use anything else.


Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417132,00.asp 


How to Make an Older Program Run in Windows 7

How to Make an Older Program Run in Windows 7

Many programmers design their software to run on a specific version of Windows. When a new Windows version appears a few years later, some older programs aren't compatible and refuse to work. If an older game or other program refuses to run under Windows 7, there’s still hope because of Windows 7’s secret compatibility mode. This mode tricks programs into thinking that they’re running under their favorite older version of Windows, letting them run in comfort.
If your old program has problems with Windows 7, follow these steps:
  1. Right-click the program’s icon and choose Properties.
  2. When the Properties dialog box appears, click the Compatibility tab.
  3. In the Compatibility Mode section, select the Run This Program in Compatibility Mode For check box.
  4. Select the program’s desired Windows version from the drop-down list.


    Compatibility mode lets you trick programs into thinking they’re running on older Windows ver


    Compatibility mode lets you trick programs into thinking they’re running on older Windows versions.
    Check your program’s box or look at its manual to see what version of Windows it expects.
  5. Click OK and then try running your program again to see whether it works better.
    Microsoft’s free Virtual Windows XP program lets you run Windows XP programs in their own XP-compatible window. Although it’s the most compatible way to run older programs, the program won’t run on every PC, and it’s kind of difficult to use.

    Source: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-make-an-older-program-run-in-windows-7.html?cid=dn_article