Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

If ever there were a poster child for the dual—one might say dueling—nature of the Windows 8 user experiences, it’s Internet Explorer 10. As with the OS on which it runs, Internet Explorer 10 offers two separate but complementary user experiences: a standard Windows application that runs in the desktop environment and a touch-first, Metro-style app.

The Metro-style version of Internet Explorer 10 works best on tablets and other touch-based devices, offering all of the gesture support you’d expect combined with the best features of the desktop browser.

For users on traditional PCs, or those who prefer the more full-featured desktop versions, Internet Explorer 10 builds on the improvements of previous IE versions, offering better performance, better web standards support, and, of course, some great integration with the Metro browser.

The strangest part of this dual browser experience, perhaps, is understanding how each of these products works with the other and, more confusingly, with third-party browsers. Here, the dual nature of Internet Explorer becomes more confusing than complementary. But with a little bit of understanding, you’ll be able to configure your PC to work with the browser or browsers you prefer.

• Understanding the relationship between your Microsoft account and key Windows 8 productivity apps

• Using People to manage contacts

• Using Mail to manage e-mail

• Using Calendar to manage your schedule

• Using Messaging to communicate with others

• Using SkyDrive to store and access files online

• Using Windows Reader to view PDF files

• Using Bing Maps to get directions and find your location

• Understanding the Other Metro productivity apps

• Using Microsoft Office for advanced productivity tasks like document editing, spreadsheet creation, presentation making, and note-taking

Throughout its decades-long existence, Windows has been known primarily for its use as the basis for the PC productivity workhorse, and it has long included a suite of useful productivity applications. These applications have always ranged from marginally useful to truly useful depending on the version of Windows and the tool in question. But with Windows 8, you are given a truly impressive arsenal of useful Metro-style productivity apps and, of course, traditional Windows applications.

This chapter examines the new Metro-style apps that Microsoft includes with Windows 8 and RT, whether they’re acquired with a new PC purchase or downloaded separately from the Windows Store. These include new contacts, e-mail, calendaring, and messaging solutions that replace legacy Windows Live applications, as well as useful new apps for cloud storage access, PDF reading and annotation, mapping, and more. This chapter also briefly examines the Office 2013 applications—Word RT, Excel RT, PowerPoint RT, and OneNote RT—which come exclusively with Windows RT, the ARM-based variant of Windows 8.

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 Metro-style productivity apps you use will provide a superset of the functionality we describe in this chapter.

Before we can discuss the individual productivity apps that are considered part of the full Windows 8 experience, you need to be aware that many of these apps—including the core People, Mail, Calendar, and Messaging apps—all rely on connectivity with your Microsoft account, or what used to be called a Windows Live ID. You may recall from previous discussions in this book that we strongly recommend using a Microsoft account for your sign-in with Windows 8 instead of an old-fashioned local account because that former account type provides such useful integration capabilities. But we realize that some of you will ignore this advice, either because you feel you know better or because you simply don’t have a choice, perhaps because the Windows 8 PC you’re using is supplied by work or for other reasons.

Don’t confuse “connected” with “online.” Some of these apps do work when the PC is offline. But they all rely on online services, not local-only data.

If that’s the case, the first time you launch People, Mail, Calendar, or Messaging, you will be asked to sign in to your Microsoft account, as shown in Figure 8-1. There is no way to use these four apps otherwise, because they are, by nature, what we call connected apps , or apps that offer no disconnected-only experience. (Microsoft calls them communications apps.)

Figure 8-1:You will sign in to your Microsoft account. Oh yes, you will.

That is, they rely on online services in ways that are pervasive and necessary. So with People, you will not manage contacts that are local to that one PC. Instead, you will manage contacts that are stored in one or more cloud-based services. Ditto for Mail, Calendar, and Messaging. None of these apps works only with local data. (In fact, none work with local data at all.)

Microsoft first took this approach with Windows Phone back in 2010, and it was somewhat controversial at the time. Some users, familiar with local personal information stores like that provided by traditional Windows applications such as Microsoft Outlook didn’t understand the benefits of centralized, cloud-based data storage, or were perhaps suspicious of such services or unwilling to change. With Windows 8, however—and with Windows Phone 8 as well, for that matter—Microsoft has leapt firmly into this connected future. And while you’re still welcome to use old-fashioned applications that lock data to a single hard drive on a single PC, the software giant won’t help you do so with its own Metro-style apps in Windows 8.

We recognize that this will still be somewhat controversial with an increasingly smaller group of people who resist change for whatever reason. But we also believe that Microsoft’s approach with Windows 8 is correct. And having long ago adopted this cloud-based model, we’re excited to access our data from anywhere now using Windows 8. We suspect most of you are as well.

When you sign in to Windows 8 for the first time with a Microsoft account, a number of interesting things happen behind the scenes, including the ability to sync settings between PCs. But Windows 8 also provides this account information to apps, including the core productivity apps that one might want to use with an online account, like Mail, Calendar, Messaging, and People. That latter app, based on the People hub that appeared first in Windows Phone, is Windows 8’s new contacts management app. And it provides a nice interface for aggregating the contact lists from multiple accounts, providing a single view into them all, and thus for all the people you know and interact with each day.

The People app is shown in Figure 8-2.

Figure 8-2:The People app helps you manage your contacts.