Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Windows PCs that do not include these full-featured Office applications will almost certainly include, or offer, some form of Microsoft Office. Check with your retailer or hardware maker for details.

Windows RT devices come with some significant downsides, however, as well, including one key issue: A lack of compatibility with traditional third-party Windows-based applications. We discuss these issues in Chapter 1.

As you may recall, with Windows 8 and RT, Microsoft has divided the PC market somewhat with two complementary Windows 8 families of products, one of which runs on traditional PCs (and, confusingly, device-like tablet PCs) based on familiar Intel x86/x64 and compatible chipsets. But there are also versions of Windows 8 that run on the ARM platform, which is typically used on very thin, light, and elegant portable devices similar to Apple’s iPad. Those Windows 8 versions, collectively called Windows RT, do include the Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. So that’s something to consider when you’re shopping for a device.

Why do Windows RT devices include Office you ask? Though Windows RT looks and works much like traditional x86 versions of Windows 8, it is not compatible with traditional Windows desktop applications like Office. So Microsoft has made a special version of Office just for Windows RT, while focusing mostly on Metro-style apps going forward on that platform.

There is some precedence for this product bundling. As long ago as 1995, when Microsoft launched the first version of Windows CE, a specially made version of Windows designed to run on non-PC devices of the day, it also bundled basic versions of its Office applications, then called Pocket Office, with the tiny machines that ran that OS. And through the years, subsequent updates to that product line, including Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, also included these Pocket Office applications as part of the platform.

And in the modern Windows Phone platform, which is today now based on the PC version of Windows 8, Microsoft continues to bundle Office. Windows Phone 8 includes what’s now called Office Mobile 2013, with portable versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that provide not just document compatibility and basic editing functionality, but also interoperability with Microsoft’s cloud-hosted Office document repositories, SkyDrive and SharePoint. So it should be no surprise that Windows RT devices—that is, those machines that sit logically between phones and “true” (or at least traditional) PCs—would also offer similar functionality.

Expectations for Office on a highly mobile device like a tablet are, of course, somewhat reduced compared to those one might have for a solution that runs on a full-featured PC. But since many Windows RT and Windows 8-based devices can be docked or otherwise transformed into more powerful PCs with keyboards, mice, and external screens, the bundling of these applications is all the more interesting for those of us who want one device that does it all.

In any event, the bundled version of Office includes the following solutions:

• Word:When you think about word processing, you think about Microsoft Word, and while there have been many pretenders throughout the years, none have approached the power and utility of Microsoft Word, nor its amazing reading experiences. In fact, Word is so good, we used it to write this book.

• Excel:Excel is Microsoft’s spreadsheet solution, and like Word, it dominates the market in which it competes. Excel offers all of the number crunching functionality you expect and lets you analyze and visualize data in amazing, graphical ways.

• PowerPoint:Microsoft’s presentation package is a staple in offices and schools around the world, offering professional features, support for amazing embedded multimedia, and the ability to broadcast to any Internet-connected PC or device.

Microsoft is also providing two Metro-style Office apps with Office 2013, OneNote and Lync. These work with both Windows 8 and Windows RT.

• OneNote:Less well known than the other Office applications, perhaps, OneNote is ideal for portable devices, offering amazing, cloud-connected note-taking capabilities.

As this chapter ably demonstrates, Windows 8 is a productivity whirlwind, with an amazing array of Metro-style apps and traditional desktop applications that will keep you up to date, efficient, and working through any conditions. From the new Metro-style People, Mail, Calendar, Messaging, SkyDrive, Reader, and Bing offerings like Maps, Bing, Finance, News, Sports, and Weather, and more, Windows 8 includes enough in the box to keep you busy for a long, long time. Of course, Windows 8 isn’t just about work. And in the next two chapters, we’ll examine the fun side of Windows 8, examining its entertainment and game capabilities, respectively.

• Viewing photos from your PC and multiple online services with the Photos app

• Using the Camera app

• Understanding your options for more sophisticated photo needs

• Enjoying your music collection and accessing Microsoft’s Music Marketplace with the touch-friendly Xbox Music app

• Understanding your options for more sophisticated music needs

• Buying and renting movies and TV shows online and watching them with the Xbox Video app

• Understanding your options for more sophisticated video needs

In the old days, users would manage their media collections on their PCs and then sync a subset of their photo, music, and video content with devices and share a further subset via discs, USB devices, and online services. While these activities are still possible in Windows 8, and will no doubt be quite popular for some people, Microsoft is embracing a new way of doing things that more closely mirrors related changes in the tech industry.

The new way of doing things was triggered by a technological advance called cloud computing . In this new model, your data isn’t stored on a single hard disk on a single PC, where it’s inaccessible from other PCs and devices and could potentially suffer from data loss because of a catastrophic hardware failure. Instead, the data is stored in the cloud—in powerful, geographically redundant data centers run by major corporations we actually trust—and is always accessible from any PC or device.

In this new cloud computing model, all of your data is always available on your PC, just like before. But now you can pick up almost any other PC or device and still access your data seamlessly, because it’s automatically synced for you. Microsoft pioneered this new approach with Windows Phone back in 2010, and it’s finally going mainstream with Windows 8.

You can see cloud computing’s impact on Windows 8 in many places, from the new Microsoft account sign-in to the synced settings and the mobile device–like productivity apps discussed in the previous chapter. But the system’s photos and entertainment capabilities, related to digital photos, music, and video, are an interesting case. This is because Microsoft had previously spent over a decade delivering an increasingly powerful but complex series of applications and services through its Windows Media and Zune product lines, to which hundreds of millions of Windows users have grown accustomed.

Today, those services are being reorganized under the Xbox entertainment brand. Previously, Xbox meant one thing and one thing only, video games. But Xbox is evolving into a more general purpose entertainment platform, adding digital music and video to its stable of capabilities. (Photos remain separate because users’ photos are their own and are not acquired from a central location.)