After a long pause that Microsoft took in 2011, it seems that it was all planned to make 2012 really happening when it comes to Microsoft’s Product launch.  From the very beginning of this year, Microsoft has been able to catch huge limelight, first for Windows 8 consumer preview, followed by the release of Microsoft Office 2013’s customer preview.  The new version that Microsoft would soon release this year, has an edge on all the existing versions that were ever released. For people who are still in a jeopardy whether to replace their Office 2010 (which is also satisfactory) with the new reveal, Here goes a dedicated post to highlight the new and unique features that are added in the upcoming Office 2013.

1- Start from where you left off

How much do you hate finding your documents again while leave them incomplete? Microsoft is wise enough to take its notice. With Office 2013, all your recent documents are just a click away. You will see a list of recently opened documents every time when you will get started with any Office 2013 application. This contributes in not only making things simpler, but also saves your time.

Editor’s note: Not only that you get recent items when you start any app of Microsoft Office 2013, if you open a document that you had previously opened, you will get a welcome back notice on the right hand side of the document. If you click on the notice, you will be taken to the exact point where you left off and closed the document last time.

2- Save documents to the cloud

Microsoft believes in offering everything to its users so that they do not have to go somewhere else. Realizing the importance of cloud storage that Google and Apple adopted, Microsoft has now offered a cloud storage facility that enables its users to store their documents online and enjoy accessing them throughout the world. All you need to do is to create a live account, or if you are already have one, just login with it. With this, all your documents will be stored in your online drive, just like you store your files in SkyDrive or Google Drive.

3- Create and edit PDF files within Office 2013

Whether you are a student, an employee or a businessman, there is one thing common in all of you and that is, you somehow daily come across PDF files that are not easy to be edited. Although there are smart ways to get the PDF files converted or edited with cracks, creating a PDF file still requires you to spend some bugs. With Office 2013, the issue comes to an end. You can now create as many PDF files as you want and can also edit your assignments, letters, reports, in short everything PDF. Life is simple with it, try it out.

4- Customize the ribbon layout

A revolution is necessary when the old trends start becoming obsolete. A strong eye catchy user interface is one of the major factors when it comes to attracting users in the online world. Office 2013 has come up, introducing a custom ribbon layout replacing the boring layered menus, toolbar and task panes. With ribbon, you can now enjoy improved screen tips and keyboard shortcuts.

5- Embed playable videos inside the documents

Microsoft has tried to add all this time. Your Office 2013 fully supports media integration in your documents where you can embed videos within your document. Think about your PowerPoint presentations, embedding movies in it is what you always wanted to do.

6- Insert images directly from the Internet

If you go few years back, you would recognize how interesting the clip art features were in the previous versions of Office like 97, 2000, 2003, etc. Then came the gallery, but all these images were limited and soon their use became outmoded too. Microsoft was again wise here to set up an online search for the images and now you can insert your images direct from the internet.  The new version has made life really easy especially when it comes to linking your documents with media.

7- Easy comments for discussion

If multiple people are working on the same document, it is always important to discuss about the document with each other. Now Microsoft Office 2013 includes a super feature of adding comments to the documents instead of just editing and changing the content. Now people can add suggestions via comments and the users can also mark the comments as done. This is a very powerful feature and will certainly become very popular in SOHO as well as large enterprises. Now people will be able to comment on the document without having a live meeting and discussing each and everything separately.

8- Animated charts

Just as stated above, Office 2013 allows its users to take the full privilege if improved graphics. Using charts, graphs and tables are one of the most widely used features of Microsoft Office in general. You can now represent your statistics in a much interactive way with the animated charts. If you have created a chart using a range of cells and you change the value of a cell, the change will be first animated on the chart to let the user know of the exact change and then it gets adjusted to the final position.

9- Flash fill in excel

Getting your hands completely on Microsoft Excel has had been difficult for many people as writing complex formulas and extracting items for data processing in a single column. However, with the newly added feature, the Flash Fill option, all you are required to do is to provide an example of what you want to Excel and it will copy it for the remaining ones.

10- Better to do list in Outlook

If you are working in an organization, you must be aware of how important Microsoft Outlook is. You can now imagine how things would be with a better user interface and ribbon layout. Microsoft offers much better ‘to do list’ which supports a smooth mailing facility.  With the new layout, the Tasks or Todo list is not even a single click away in Outlook 2013. You only have to hover your cursor over the Tasks label and the tasks overview will automatically popup to show the most recent tasks.

Microsoft has taken a clever step with its launch of Office 2013 which has open new doors to a better and simpler use. There is a lot more to be revealed about this upcoming version, so keep your fingers crossed!

Are you using Office 2013 Customer Preview? If not, then you can download Office 2013 customer preview for free. You may also want to activate Office 2013 online for free to use it for a longer period of time. If you are already using Office 2013, what are your thoughts about the new features in Office 2013? Are they useful? Which feature do you like the most?

Since Microsoft has released Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview, it has been a good time using the Office suite until now. I had been prompted about activating my installation of Office 2013 whenever I opened any Office app but I never cared about the warnings. But today the period has ended and now I must activate Office 2013 before using it further. So I have finally activated my Office 2013 installation and here are the steps that I have followed to activate MS Office 2013.

The above warning will come whenever you open any Office 2013 product with the count down of remain grace period to activate Office 2013.

1. In the first step, you have to go to your Microsoft account to get the free product key of Office 2013 Customer Preview.
   
2. Now open any Microsoft Office 2013 product which will come up with the above mentioned warning. You will need to click on the “Change Product Key” button and copy the product key you’ve got in step 1 here. Also check the checkbox which says “Attempt to automatically activate my product online”. Then click on the Install button to continue.
   
3. Your account will be updated. Click on OK to continue.
   
4. Now Microsoft Office Activation Wizard will open automatically. You can activate the software over the Internet because this is the only option available right now.
   

   

5. You have successfully activated Microsoft Office 2013 and now you can continue using the Office suite.

If you are looking for volume license activation of Office 2013 using KMS and MAK activation methods, you can follow the steps given in the TechNet article.

Microsoft has released their new Office Suite, Microsoft Office 2013. It was codenamed as Office 15 which will now be called Office 2013. The beta version of Office 2013 is called Customer Preview version. There will be two ways to use the next Office, one through regular purchase of Office 2013 and secondly through a subscription model of Office 365.

Before going further, let’s look at a short introduction video of Office 2013:

According to Microsoft, this new Office suite will be completely cross platform compatible and will work on multiple platforms seamlessly like a desktop computer or a touch enabled device. This is very similar to Windows 8 tablet features.

By default, Office 2013 will save documents in SkyDrive and your SkyDrive cloud account will be accessible across all devices enabling you to edit and see your documents on any device without having to transfer from one device to another.

Microsoft Office 2013 will come in three versions:

1. Home Premium
2. Small Business Premium
3. ProPlus

These versions will be available if you buy Office 2013 but if you want a subscription based access to the Office features, you will need to go for Office 365 which is completely web based and does not require any installation.

Office 2013 system requirements

Office 2013 will not be able to run on Windows XP or Windows Vista. You will need to be running Windows 7 or Windows 8 in order to install and run Office 2013. Other requirements are as follows:

Office 2013 Preview requirements:

• 1 GHz or faster processor with SSE2 instruction set
• 1GB or more RAM
• 3GB of available hard drive space
• .NET version 3.5, 4.0 or 4.5

Installation and uninstallation of Office 2013

Installation of Office 2013 is very easy. It only requires very basic software installation knowledge. One thing to take care is that Office 2013 can be installed and run beside previous Office suites like Office 2007 and Office 2010. But you will need to specify this during the installation process.

Office 2013 offline installers

One needs to download Microsoft Office 2013 only after signing up with Microsoft using this link. But for your convenience, I have extracted the direct download links to the offline installers of Office 2013. You can click on the below links and the download will start immediately.

Office 2013 (English, 32-bit) (624 MB)

Office 2013 (English, 64-bit) (702 MB)

Office 2013 (Español, 32-bit) (624 MB)

Office 2013 (Español, 64-bit) (702 MB)

Office 2013 (Japanese, 32-bit) (624 MB)

Office 2013 (Japanese, 64-bit) (702 MB)

After downloading and installation, you will need Microsoft Office 2013 product key in order to use the suite. The product key can be obtained from here.