Where Bing Maps really shines is in its ability to help you find your way. If you want to get directions, click the Directions button in the app bar to display the Directions pane shown in Figure 8-58.
Figure 8-58: Bing’s Directions interface
Then, you can enter starting and ending locations in the provided boxes. The first will default to current location, which is exactly what it sounds like. And if you want to reverse the directions, tap the directional button at the right of the top box.
When you’re ready to get the directions, click Enter (or tap the right arrow icon to the right of the bottom box). Bing will think for a bit and then provide its attractive, full-screen driving directions as shown in Figure 8-59.
Figure 8-59: Getting from here to there with Bing Maps
You can zoom into parts of the route by clicking, tapping, or otherwise selecting individual parts of the route display at the top of the screen. And the printed version of the Bing Maps directions is particularly nice: You access this interface, as always through Charms, Devices, and then the appropriate printer. The Print pane can be seen in Figure 8-60.
You can also use the Clear Map button to exit from this display.
Figure 8-60: Bing Maps makes beautiful printed directions.
Bing
The Bing app is a Metro-based version of the Bing website, with a beautiful full-screen interface sporting Bing’s beloved “picture of the day,” a prominent search box, and links for searches that are popular right at this moment. You can see the Bing app in Figure 8-61.
Figure 8-61: The Bing app
Click the prominent More button in the bottom right of the screen, and you can view a more visual, Metro-like take on the day’s biggest happenings, as in Figure 8-62.
Figure 8-62: Bing’s more visual view of today’s big searches
Bing Finance, News, Sports, and Weather
Microsoft also provides four very similar looking apps, Bing Finance, News, Sports, and Weather, which take the notion of a news aggregator and turn it into something truly beautiful and useful. Each obviously focuses on its own core topic, with Finance providing a gorgeous front end to the stock market and financial news and topics, News providing a general purpose news experience, Sports taking on locale-specific sports news of note, and Weather doing its best to make the weather look gorgeous, no matter how ugly it gets outside.
Since each is so similar from a presentation perspective, let’s just look at one, Sports, to see how something basic can be made to look so beautiful. In Figure 8-63, you can see the Sports landing page, which provides beautiful, magazine-style photography and layout.
Scroll over to the right and you’ll see other top stories from the day, highlighted again in a highly visual style with a nice layout as in Figure 8-64.
Each of the apps is fully customizable in some way. In Sports, for example, you can follow your favorite sports, teams, or players. And in Weather, of course, you can configure the weather display for your favorite places, and even pin individual weather tiles for each on the Windows 8 Start screen.
Figure 8-63: The Sports app
Figure 8-64: Top stories in Sports
Microsoft Office Comes to Windows… Sort Of
Over the years, we’ve been struck by how many people seem confused by the relationship between Microsoft’s two most successful product franchises, Windows and Office. That is, many people believe that Office is “part” of Windows and that these two very separate software solutions are thus one. And some are surprised when they reinstall Windows, or get a new PC, to discover that Office is no longer present. So we’ve spent a lot of time trying to educate people about the differences between Windows and Office, and how they are separately acquired.
To be fair, the reason so many people believed that Windows and Office came together is that, for many, they did. Most people acquire both Windows and Office together with a new PC purchase and thus don’t draw a distinction between the two. The problem is, if you’re not paying attention at the time of that PC purchase, you may not get Office at all, or you may get a version of Office that you don’t want.
Also, during the life cycle of Windows 7, many PCs came with a stripped-down Office version called Office Starter that included two very basic Office applications, Word Starter and Excel Starter. This solution came free with many PCs and was designed to be electronically upgraded to higher-end, paid versions of Office.
With Windows 8—and a new family of Office products branded as Office 2013—Microsoft is completely changing the equation. The ARM-based versions of Windows 8, called Windows RT, actually do come with a special version of Office 2013, and while this freebie Office version doesn’t offer all of the power and flexibility of the high-end Office 2013 suites, it’s a far cry from the basic experience previously offered by Office Starter. (Office Starter is no longer available.) Office 2013 for Windows RT version includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and if you purchase any Windows RT-based device, you’ll get these powerful applications for free.
Windows PCs that do not include these full-featured Office applications will almost certainly include, or offer, some form of Microsoft Office. Check with your retailer or hardware maker for details.
Windows RT devices come with some significant downsides, however, as well, including one key issue: A lack of compatibility with traditional third-party Windows-based applications. We discuss these issues in Chapter 1.
As you may recall, with Windows 8 and RT, Microsoft has divided the PC market somewhat with two complementary Windows 8 families of products, one of which runs on traditional PCs (and, confusingly, device-like tablet PCs) based on familiar Intel x86/x64 and compatible chipsets. But there are also versions of Windows 8 that run on the ARM platform, which is typically used on very thin, light, and elegant portable devices similar to Apple’s iPad. Those Windows 8 versions, collectively called Windows RT, do include the Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. So that’s something to consider when you’re shopping for a device.
Why do Windows RT devices include Office you ask? Though Windows RT looks and works much like traditional x86 versions of Windows 8, it is not compatible with traditional Windows desktop applications like Office. So Microsoft has made a special version of Office just for Windows RT, while focusing mostly on Metro-style apps going forward on that platform.
There is some precedence for this product bundling. As long ago as 1995, when Microsoft launched the first version of Windows CE, a specially made version of Windows designed to run on non-PC devices of the day, it also bundled basic versions of its Office applications, then called Pocket Office, with the tiny machines that ran that OS. And through the years, subsequent updates to that product line, including Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, also included these Pocket Office applications as part of the platform.