If you have an Outlook.com or Hotmail address, you also have access to free web app versions of Microsoft Office that you can access from anywhere. Now Microsoft has added a new feature that makes the apps even easier to navigate. Let’s check it out.
If you aren’t familiar with the Office web apps, it’s not surprising. They are sort of tucked away in Outlook.com. Go your Outlook.com account and select that little drop-down arrow in the upper-left of your inbox.
You’ll see the option to choose Mail, People, Calendar or Skydrive. Choose Skydrive.
Once in Skydrive, you’ll see a + symbol. If you select, it you’ll have the option to create Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and plain text documents.
I chose to create a Word Document, you can see that it looks pretty familiar if you’re a Word User.
A new feature that Microsoft has recently added is called “Tell Me.” Say I want to take a certain action. I can start typing it in the search field and Word will offer suggestions as to the action I’d like to take. The wording doesn’t have to be exact and it’s easier than searching through help.
Selecting the action applies the action. If I selected “increase indent,” I would increase the indent of the paragraph I was working on.
If I type font, I’ll get a drop-down menu with several option. By choosing Font Color, the menu to change colors appears immediately.
With so many options available in Word, it can often be very confusing to find what you need. I hope Microsoft considers adding this function to future Office 365 updates.
~ Cynthia
Nice tutorial. Will have to take another look at Outlook.com
Love this, made using office so much better, thank you.
This is the best news I’ve heard in a long time. I’ve got Microsoft Professional & I catch hell trying to do things that I use to do in the old Microsoft. They don’t need to fix something that isn’t broke. Thanks for the newsletter.
I have just, after awful effort, gotten an outlook account because I learned that you could get Word free through it. Haven’t tried it yet. Hope it works ok on my iPad for which I just got a keyboard.
Thanks. This is very helpful. I use outlook.com and now I a better understand how to use “skydrive”. Question? When I complete a document do I save it on the hard drive or to the cloud?
That’s your choice. But if you save it to the cloud you can access it from any device.