Saturday, February 23, 2013

Office 2013 – A thing of beauty, but not quite perfect …

I own Office Home and Student 2003, which has allowed me to use Outlook for my personal email for about a decade. Office 2007 and very nice and I used those apps for my word processing, spread sheets and presentations for half a decade. They annoyingly replaced the wonderful Outlook with the much less useful (for me) OneNote in that version, probably because the students use of OneNote makes more sense that Outlook would in a hotmail world.

I skipped the 2010 revision since nothing much had changed, but 2013 got me interested because I like the new look of the apps, they are fast, and they have a host of new(ish) features relating to mobile, web, cloud, and so on. WHat is more, the subscription service gives you all the applications … a full version of Professional if you will. So I bit the bullet and signed up for the moth by month trial. First month free.

I must say that, after only a few days, I am very pleased. Excel makes much nicer looking graphs. The newest Outlook feels very sophisticated yet sucked in and used my OL2003 settings with nary a hitch. I have to say that I am sold.

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The one thing I really dislike so far is that Word 2013 just will not allow me to edit blog posts for my blogger account. I have not figured out the magic incantation, despite reading Greywulf’s blog on the subject. He obviously got it working for his blog, but my account refuses to hook up.

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Luckily, Windows Write 2011 is an excellent blog editor and it works just fine. But I would like to work in Word if possible. I hope they eventually fix this glitch, as this would really put the cherry on top of a great set of applications.