Hello again and welcome back to our course on Word 2013. In this section, we’re going
to look at what’s new in Word 2013. I’ve already mentioned that the use of touch devices
is a feature throughout Office 2013 now and, of course, Word is no exception to that; so
one of the things that I’ll be coming back to from time to time is how to do things in
Word 2013 using a touch device. But in this section I want to look specifically at some
of the new features and functionality of Word 2013.
Now there’s a very useful page on the Microsoft.com website in the Office section called What’s
new in Word 2013. And that list with a little bit of explanation in each case, the main
functional changes in Word 2013. So let’s go through the main ones now and then we’ll
come back to each of them in detail later on in the course.
Let’s start with New Read Mode. And this is a new mode that’s available in Word whereby
virtually all of the, if you like, the clutter, the commands and so on, are removed from the
screen and make it behave much more like a sort of a book reader. Now many of you can
probably guess where the idea of this has come from and why Microsoft are promoting
this approach to using Word. But as you’ll see later on it’s actually a really good
feature because apart from the fact that you can just sit and read a document with it,
you can also have certain tools still handy such as things like searching on the web,
translating, and so on. That’s a very useful new mode in Word.
Now if you’ve used Word before you’ll be very familiar with zooming in and out to
either look at something more closely or to get a broader zoomed out view of a page or
a couple of pages or whatever. Object Zoom is a new feature which gives you a very quick
way of getting close up to something, so perhaps you want to look closely at a picture or the
contents of a table where perhaps the text is quite small. Object Zoom let’s you zoom
straight in close up to something and then when you finish looking at it close up, you
can just tap outside the object and zoom back out to where you were before. So another useful
new feature within Word 2013.
Now, of course, much of the emphasis with Word 2013 is on catering for online storage
of documents, saving them in the Cloud, specifically on Microsoft SkyDrive. And one of the situations
people are, in particularly, when they store documents in the Cloud if you’re working
on a remote version of a document, it’s stored online, and you may well be using different
devices in different locations at different times of the day yourself. So let’s suppose
you have a PC at work. You may use a laptop when you’re visiting customers. You may
use a different device when you’re at home. When you come to access an online document,
a new feature called Resume Reading in Word 2013 enables you to carry on with the document
exactly where you left off. And that’s a great feature, particularly if you’re dealing
with a long document and maybe you just want to make sure that you haven’t got to spend
several minutes finding where you are before you can carry on reading and perhaps reviewing
a document. Another useful feature when you have an adequate
internet connection, of course, is the ability to watch an online video right from within
a Word document. So the Word document contains the necessary link to take you through to
the video and when you’re at that point in the document, you can literally just play
the video, as I said, provided you have an adequate internet connection at that time.
And a very useful feature, particularly when you’re working with long documents, is the
ability to collapse or expand parts of a document with just a tap on the screen or a click of
the mouse. This means you can put a summary of a section in a heading and then let each
reader decide whether they want to open the section and read the details.
Many of the new and improved features in Word 2013 relate to working together with other
people on documents. And this extends to not only saving files in the Cloud, but also being
able to share files in the Cloud. And now there are good facilities for actually working
on the same document as colleagues at the same time as those colleagues. So you can
both work on the same file at the same time. Now there are some constraints and restrictions
on this but subject to those, it’s a pretty effective way of working collaboratively on
a document. Not only can you share documents on SkyDrive, of course, but there are extensive
facilities generally for sharing documents using Microsoft SharePoint.
Another feature that’s important for collaborative working, and if you’ve ever done collaborative
working I’m sure you’ll be familiar with it, is Change Tracking in Word. Now in Word
2013, there is a new revision view called Simple Markup which provides a clean, uncomplicated
view of the document but where you can still see where tracked changes have been made.
One of the very long standing features in Word related to collaborative working is the
use of Comments. Well in Word 2013, you can reply to comments and you can mark the comments
as done. Although the comments are grayed out, they’re still there so you can still
see the history of a conversation about a comment.
Nowadays the standards of presentation in documents are very high generally speaking.
And more and more, Word which started out as a pretty straightforward word processing
package is now seen as something close to a desktop publishing package. And in Word
2013, there are a whole new range of templates available and these templates have been updates
for a modern crisp, clean look and feel. Now for a very long time Adobe PDF format,
Portable Document Format, has been the standard for interchanging readable documents. And
for a few versions of Word, it’s been possible to generate, to write PDF format documents
as versions of Word documents that you’ve been working on. Well in Word 2013, you can
actually now open PDFs and you can edit the content. Now many of the features you’re
using Word are available. There are restraints and restrictions that we’ll go over later
in the course, but basically this is the first time that you’ve been able to open and edit
PDFs. And finally another very useful feature in
terms of the presentation of a document is the new Live Layout and Alignment guide facility
where as you move photos and shapes around in your document, you get a live preview of
how the document will look in each of the possible sizes and orientations and so on.
So there we have it. That’s a whistle stop tour of the new features in Word 2013, and
it’s now time to get started on the course proper. The first thing I’m going to look
at is the use of touch in Word 2013. If you’ve used any components of Office 2013 already,
many of the features of touch in Word follow the general pattern from within Office 2013
and a little bit of information about that available on the Microsoft.com website. But
for the purposes of this course, I’m going to go over the basics of use of touch in Office
2013 generally first and then I’ll cover the specific aspects of using touch in specific
aspects of Word 2013 as we go through the course. So, that’s it for now.
I’ll see you in the next section.