Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

• Map Style:Maps supports two display styles, Road View, which is the default, and Aerial View. You can toggle this view with the Map Style button in the app bar.

If Maps gets lost for some reason, you can use the My location button in the app bar to find yourself again. Simple.

To find a particular location with Bing Maps, you use the system-wide Search contract functionality, available from the Search pane. There are many ways to display this pane, but the simplest, perhaps, is to type Winkey + Q; mouse or touch users can display the Charms instead and then choose Search.

To search, simply type a location name into the search box and press Enter (or select the Search button). When you do, Bing Maps will likely navigate to the exact location, unless you’ve been too vague. A direct hit can be seen in Figure 8-57.

Figure 8-57:Find a location with Bing Maps.

Bing Maps utilizes Bing’s search technologies on the back end, so you might expect searching to be fairly granular. It’s not. Yes, you can use paris france to find Paris, France. And if you type in las vegas , Bing Maps will zoom right to Las Vegas, Nevada. But if you meant Las Vegas, New Mexico—or Paris, Texas, for that matter—you’ll need to be more specific. Or, you can use a neat option that appears in the app bar after a location has been found: You’ll see a new More results button that will display other possibilities. (You can also use the Refine button to refine your search, or the Clear button to start over.)

Where Bing Maps really shines is in its ability to help you find your way. If you want to get directions, click the Directions button in the app bar to display the Directions pane shown in Figure 8-58.

Figure 8-58:Bing’s Directions interface

Then, you can enter starting and ending locations in the provided boxes. The first will default to current location , which is exactly what it sounds like. And if you want to reverse the directions, tap the directional button at the right of the top box.

When you’re ready to get the directions, click Enter (or tap the right arrow icon to the right of the bottom box). Bing will think for a bit and then provide its attractive, full-screen driving directions as shown in Figure 8-59.

Figure 8-59:Getting from here to there with Bing Maps

You can zoom into parts of the route by clicking, tapping, or otherwise selecting individual parts of the route display at the top of the screen. And the printed version of the Bing Maps directions is particularly nice: You access this interface, as always through Charms, Devices, and then the appropriate printer. The Print pane can be seen in Figure 8-60.

You can also use the Clear Map button to exit from this display.

Figure 8-60:Bing Maps makes beautiful printed directions.

The Bing app is a Metro-based version of the Bing website, with a beautiful full-screen interface sporting Bing’s beloved “picture of the day,” a prominent search box, and links for searches that are popular right at this moment. You can see the Bing app in Figure 8-61.

Figure 8-61:The Bing app

Click the prominent More button in the bottom right of the screen, and you can view a more visual, Metro-like take on the day’s biggest happenings, as in Figure 8-62.

Figure 8-62:Bing’s more visual view of today’s big searches

Microsoft also provides four very similar looking apps, Bing Finance, News, Sports, and Weather, which take the notion of a news aggregator and turn it into something truly beautiful and useful. Each obviously focuses on its own core topic, with Finance providing a gorgeous front end to the stock market and financial news and topics, News providing a general purpose news experience, Sports taking on locale-specific sports news of note, and Weather doing its best to make the weather look gorgeous, no matter how ugly it gets outside.

Since each is so similar from a presentation perspective, let’s just look at one, Sports, to see how something basic can be made to look so beautiful. In Figure 8-63, you can see the Sports landing page, which provides beautiful, magazine-style photography and layout.

Scroll over to the right and you’ll see other top stories from the day, highlighted again in a highly visual style with a nice layout as in Figure 8-64.

Each of the apps is fully customizable in some way. In Sports, for example, you can follow your favorite sports, teams, or players. And in Weather, of course, you can configure the weather display for your favorite places, and even pin individual weather tiles for each on the Windows 8 Start screen.

Figure 8-63:The Sports app

Figure 8-64:Top stories in Sports

Over the years, we’ve been struck by how many people seem confused by the relationship between Microsoft’s two most successful product franchises, Windows and Office. That is, many people believe that Office is “part” of Windows and that these two very separate software solutions are thus one. And some are surprised when they reinstall Windows, or get a new PC, to discover that Office is no longer present. So we’ve spent a lot of time trying to educate people about the differences between Windows and Office, and how they are separately acquired.

To be fair, the reason so many people believed that Windows and Office came together is that, for many, they did. Most people acquire both Windows and Office together with a new PC purchase and thus don’t draw a distinction between the two. The problem is, if you’re not paying attention at the time of that PC purchase, you may not get Office at all, or you may get a version of Office that you don’t want.

Also, during the life cycle of Windows 7, many PCs came with a stripped-down Office version called Office Starter that included two very basic Office applications, Word Starter and Excel Starter. This solution came free with many PCs and was designed to be electronically upgraded to higher-end, paid versions of Office.

With Windows 8—and a new family of Office products branded as Office 2013—Microsoft is completely changing the equation. The ARM-based versions of Windows 8, called Windows RT, actually do come with a special version of Office 2013, and while this freebie Office version doesn’t offer all of the power and flexibility of the high-end Office 2013 suites, it’s a far cry from the basic experience previously offered by Office Starter. (Office Starter is no longer available.) Office 2013 for Windows RT version includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and if you purchase any Windows RT-based device, you’ll get these powerful applications for free.