And in the modern Windows Phone platform, which is today now based on the PC version of Windows 8, Microsoft continues to bundle Office. Windows Phone 8 includes what’s now called Office Mobile 2013, with portable versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that provide not just document compatibility and basic editing functionality, but also interoperability with Microsoft’s cloud-hosted Office document repositories, SkyDrive and SharePoint. So it should be no surprise that Windows RT devices—that is, those machines that sit logically between phones and “true” (or at least traditional) PCs—would also offer similar functionality.
Expectations for Office on a highly mobile device like a tablet are, of course, somewhat reduced compared to those one might have for a solution that runs on a full-featured PC. But since many Windows RT and Windows 8-based devices can be docked or otherwise transformed into more powerful PCs with keyboards, mice, and external screens, the bundling of these applications is all the more interesting for those of us who want one device that does it all.
In any event, the bundled version of Office includes the following solutions:
• Word: When you think about word processing, you think about Microsoft Word, and while there have been many pretenders throughout the years, none have approached the power and utility of Microsoft Word, nor its amazing reading experiences. In fact, Word is so good, we used it to write this book.
• Exceclass="underline" Excel is Microsoft’s spreadsheet solution, and like Word, it dominates the market in which it competes. Excel offers all of the number crunching functionality you expect and lets you analyze and visualize data in amazing, graphical ways.
• PowerPoint: Microsoft’s presentation package is a staple in offices and schools around the world, offering professional features, support for amazing embedded multimedia, and the ability to broadcast to any Internet-connected PC or device.
Microsoft is also providing two Metro-style Office apps with Office 2013, OneNote and Lync. These work with both Windows 8 and Windows RT.
• OneNote: Less well known than the other Office applications, perhaps, OneNote is ideal for portable devices, offering amazing, cloud-connected note-taking capabilities.
Summary
As this chapter ably demonstrates, Windows 8 is a productivity whirlwind, with an amazing array of Metro-style apps and traditional desktop applications that will keep you up to date, efficient, and working through any conditions. From the new Metro-style People, Mail, Calendar, Messaging, SkyDrive, Reader, and Bing offerings like Maps, Bing, Finance, News, Sports, and Weather, and more, Windows 8 includes enough in the box to keep you busy for a long, long time. Of course, Windows 8 isn’t just about work. And in the next two chapters, we’ll examine the fun side of Windows 8, examining its entertainment and game capabilities, respectively.
Chapter 9
Relaxing with Windows 8’s Photo and Entertainment Apps
• Viewing photos from your PC and multiple online services with the Photos app
• Using the Camera app
• Understanding your options for more sophisticated photo needs
• Enjoying your music collection and accessing Microsoft’s Music Marketplace with the touch-friendly Xbox Music app
• Understanding your options for more sophisticated music needs
• Buying and renting movies and TV shows online and watching them with the Xbox Video app
• Understanding your options for more sophisticated video needs
In the old days, users would manage their media collections on their PCs and then sync a subset of their photo, music, and video content with devices and share a further subset via discs, USB devices, and online services. While these activities are still possible in Windows 8, and will no doubt be quite popular for some people, Microsoft is embracing a new way of doing things that more closely mirrors related changes in the tech industry.
The new way of doing things was triggered by a technological advance called cloud computing. In this new model, your data isn’t stored on a single hard disk on a single PC, where it’s inaccessible from other PCs and devices and could potentially suffer from data loss because of a catastrophic hardware failure. Instead, the data is stored in the cloud—in powerful, geographically redundant data centers run by major corporations we actually trust—and is always accessible from any PC or device.
In this new cloud computing model, all of your data is always available on your PC, just like before. But now you can pick up almost any other PC or device and still access your data seamlessly, because it’s automatically synced for you. Microsoft pioneered this new approach with Windows Phone back in 2010, and it’s finally going mainstream with Windows 8.
You can see cloud computing’s impact on Windows 8 in many places, from the new Microsoft account sign-in to the synced settings and the mobile device–like productivity apps discussed in the previous chapter. But the system’s photos and entertainment capabilities, related to digital photos, music, and video, are an interesting case. This is because Microsoft had previously spent over a decade delivering an increasingly powerful but complex series of applications and services through its Windows Media and Zune product lines, to which hundreds of millions of Windows users have grown accustomed.
Today, those services are being reorganized under the Xbox entertainment brand. Previously, Xbox meant one thing and one thing only, video games. But Xbox is evolving into a more general purpose entertainment platform, adding digital music and video to its stable of capabilities. (Photos remain separate because users’ photos are their own and are not acquired from a central location.)
If you’re not ready to move forward and utilize online services like SkyDrive to store your music collection, or rent and buy movies and TV shows from Microsoft’s Xbox-based marketplaces, no need to worry; all of the local-based digital media capabilities in Windows 7 are still present in Windows 8. But as with the rest of this book, this chapter focuses solely on the new capabilities. And in this specific case, that means enjoying digital photo, music, and video content in new ways through new Metro experiences.
Thanks to the dynamic nature of its new apps platform, the Metro-style apps that Microsoft includes with Windows 8/RT will change over time, so it’s highly likely that the apps described in this chapter will appear somewhat differently over time and will include additional features. This is normal, and as a general statement, it’s probably fair to say that the versions of the Photos, Camera, Xbox Music, and Xbox Video apps you use will provide a superset of the functionality we describe in this chapter.
A Note About the Windows 8 Entertainment Apps and Your Microsoft Account
In Chapter 8, we discussed how many of Windows 8’s productivity apps are simple clients for online services provided by Microsoft and other companies. As such, you must sign in to your Microsoft account to access many of these apps, even if you’ve elected—against our advice—to not automatically do so by signing in to the PC with a Microsoft account.