The Vangelis NewsRoom » Office

Microsoft Office for iOS and Android set for 2013 release?

Bretos Margetis — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 15:52:26 +0000

A mobile version of Microsoft Office for iOS and Android could be coming early next year.

The news was confirmed to the Verge ”through several sources close to Microsoft’s plans.”

Office Mobile will reportedly be launched in the form of separate free apps that will offer support for Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents, respectively. Before downloading the apps, one will first have have a Microsoft account.

However, these apps will only allow users to view the documents. An Office 365 subscription (which will be available as an in-app purchase) will be required in order to gain editing functionality, though, according to the report, it will be quite basic and “won’t go very far in attempting to replace regular full use of a desktop Office version.”

The Verge recently reported that a “recent Microsoft press release from the company’s Czech Republic subsidiary” unveiled that Office Mobile would arrive on iOS between late February and early March, and on Android in May.

However, Microsoft denied the rumour, saying “the information shared by our Czech subsidiary is not accurate. We do not have anything further to share at this time.”

Rumours concerning the Android and iOS versions of the Office suite have been in circulation for some time now, with previous reports pointing to a November release of the product.

by Aatif Sulleyman

Word 2010 Photo Effects

Bretos Margetis — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:12:26 +0000

Make more of an impact with images, using Word’s Photo Effects.

Word 2010 has added an extra category to SmartArt graphics – Picture graphics. It opens a whole new area of design, where you can incorporate photo images into many different styles of graphic. When a SmartArt Picture graphic is inserted, text and photos of your choosing can be added, to make a finished page element, which looks professional and modern.

Also new to the latest Word are photo effect filters, which can be used to correct simple defects in photos added to a page and apply special effects. You don’t need any Photoshop skills to use them as they’re applied by pointing and shooting from a palette of thumbnails.

To try out a new SmartArt Picture graphic, select SmartArt from the Insert tab in the ribbon. Select Picture from the left-hand column in the Choose a SmartArt Graphic dialog and click on a graphic thumbnail to pick from the 36 pre-drawn designs. The graphic appears on the Word page.

To add descriptive text to the elements in the graphic, you can either click on the placeholders or open the outline panel for the object, by clicking the double arrow in the left-hand edge of its frame. The text can be freely edited.

Photos can be inserted in much the same way, by clicking on the photo placeholders in the main graphic or in the outline panel. Clicking opens a file selector, to browse to the photo file you want to use. The photo is automatically scaled to fit the graphic, but this can be changed using the Crop panel of the Format Shape option on the object’s right-button menu.

To change the style of elements within the graphic, click on selections in the SmartArt Styles selector of the ribbon’s SmartArt Tools tab.

Photos in a SmartArt Picture graphic, or just in a photo placed directly on the page, can be easily adjusted. Click on the photo and select the Picture Tools tab in the ribbon. As well as properties like border, shadow and bevel, there are the new Corrections and Color palettes in the ribbon.

The Corrections palette offers Sharpen and Soften and Brightness and Contrast palettes, where thumbnails of the selected photo are shown with a range of alterations applied. Hovering the mouse pointer over a thumbnail previews the correction on the photo in situ and clicking the thumbnail applies the effect.

The Color palette does the same for Saturation, Tone and Recoloring and there are other effects available within the Picture Tools tab options, too. Click on Remove Background, for example and the program does its best to determine the foreground elements of the photo and remove everything else.

Unless the foreground is very well defined and the background very plain, it’s unlikely the automated process will work perfectly first time, but you can add and remove areas of the selection, to outline the parts you want. The new SmartArt and photo adjustments within Word 2010 offer considerable scope to add images to documents and improve the messages they are trying to convey.

Microsoft Office 15 To Offer ‘Touch Mode’

Bretos Margetis — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:22:21 +0000

New reports suggest that Microsoft is going to treat users of its Office client apps (Office 15 client) with a new “touch mode” button which will make the operational aspects of the apps in touch-centric devices far more easier than they are today.

It’s been a while now since the users of the Office client apps were demanding that the company introduce more touch-friendly, tablet and smartphone centric versions.

Meanwhile, Microsoft had already made it clear that four of the Office 15 apps that will come integrated with the Windows 8 on ARM tablets, will be more Desktop based, however, many critics have expressed their doubts over the company’s ability to make the system’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote apps work more efficiently with touch-centric devices.

Despite such criticism, the recently leaked Office 15 suite images pretty much clear up all those doubts as the apps appear to have a “touch mode” which helps users to switch between regular and touch-centric modes.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley revealed that “currently this button doesn’t really function,” adding that “however, Microsoft’s intention is to enable the Office UI to switch to something more touch-friendly when Office 15 apps are used.”