By: Marc Israel, Office Division Group Lead for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa and Indian Ocean Islands

Life is getting busier and people are continuously looking for a way to get more out of the time they have at their disposal.

The availability of Office 2013 is a step in that direction. Office 2013 makes the end user more productive in both a work and home environment. With Office you can continue working offline, while the integration with cloud technologies allows you to sync your documents seamlessly allowing you to be far more productive.

Office 365 Home Premium, one of the offerings within Office 2013, is a cloud service designed for busy households and people juggling ever-increasing work and family responsibilities. In a recent global survey,1 nearly 60 percent of people said they don’t have the time to do the things they want to do, and more than 80 percent said they could save one or more hours a day if they were better organized. Office 365 Home Premium is designed to help people be more productive from virtually anywhere and find the flexibility to do the things they want.

To help people find more time to do the things they want, we are introducing Time to 365 (http://www.office.com/timeto365), a new crowd-sourced website where people can find and share tips, tricks, ideas and inspiration from around the world. Contributors include experts such as “techorating” pro Janna Robinson (http://www.jannarobinson.com) and everyday working parents who have found ways to simplify their lives. Tips on the site include, for example,
an idea for organizing your grocery list with OneNote on your phone, a pointer on how to pick the right-sized TV for your living room, and ways to use Office applications to help plan a child’s birthday party.

What are the top 10 features of the new Office, you may ask?

  1. If you are reading, not writing or editing, click or tap View, then Read Mode in Word to hide the writing tools and menus.
  2. Re-open a document or presentation, and keep reading right where you left off with Resume reading in Word and PowerPoint.
  3. Like a data assistant that finishes your work for you, Flash Fill in Excel detects what you want to do and enters the rest of your data in one fell swoop, following patterns in your data.
  4. Dress up your data with conditional formatting such as bars and color scales through the Quick Analysis Lens in Excel.
  5. Tired of trying to precisely match the colors of shapes and pictures in PowerPoint? Let Eyedropper in PowerPoint do the work for you.
  6. With an improved Presenter View in PowerPoint, the audience views your slides on a main screen, while you control the show on another screen that only you can see.
  7. Inline replies in Outlook allow you to reply with one click by typing your response right in the Reading Pane.
  8. Grab a quick glance at your schedule, an appointment or your to-do list with peeks in Outlook, without having to switch from email to calendar or other modes.
  9. If the sound of typing is distracting, you can handwrite notes in OneNote instead of typing them. This is also useful if you’re faster at writing than at typing.
  10. Instead of re-typing information or relying on links to documents, feel free to embed files in OneNote to keep them handy online or offline.

And a bonus one:

Seamlessly integrated with SkyDrive, you can save your Office documents to the cloud in one click, or work offline with your synchronized documents on your computer. A great way to keep your documents secured, while allowing you to stay productive when Internet is not available.

 

Note:

1 Microsoft surveyed more than 10,000 people in over 20 countries.