– Yes, You Can Get Microsoft Word for Free: Here’s How

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For Office, which in recent years has been challenged by cheaper or free alternatives, the news is a big deal. It keeps Microsoft ahead of the pack, especially for customers who can’t get by with another application.

But can the updates do anything to win back folks who switched to the apps that Google and Apple have? There’s no definitive answer to that question, because it all comes down to what you need from these kinds of programs. Office and Google Docs, the two apps I’ll focus on here, both have pluses and minuses. I’ll explore the features in both that make them worth your while so you can ultimately decide which program to pick. Using it, you can right click on a word to run a Bing search and get more information, without leaving Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Search results pop up in window on the right side, next to whatever you’re working on, and include results from Wikipedia, Bing images and Web results. Click any of the links to open your browser and read more. The best part of Smart Lookup is that uses the context of the words around the one you selected to get the best search results.

For instance, if you run Smart Lookup on the word “dating” in sentence about carbon dating, Bing will show results for carbon dating, not romance. Google Docs has had a similar research tool for years, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as a this new Smart Lookup feature or even a regular Google search.

Microsoft acknowledges that the Office apps have so many features that it can be hard to remember where to find all of them in their various menus. So Microsoft’s Office team created a new search tool to help you find them. Think of it as a far less annoying and more helpful Clippy. In the ribbon main menu bar at the top for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, click on “Tell me what you want to do” and start typing the name of a feature you need.

The app will find it and display the exact menu you need, without needing to dig around for it. It’s a simple addition, but one that would have come in handy for me many years ago writing college papers and constantly forgetting where to find the footnote tool. The new Share menu in each app shows everyone who has access to that file. Hover over a name and you’ll see a pop-up menu with quick links to send a message or start a voice or video call with Skype, without opening the Skype app on your computer.

The only downside to this feature is that it only works if you have the Skype app installed on your machine and use Skype for Business. While it includes several big changes, Office is all about the small touches. One little new feature that adds a lot of functionality is the ability to pick up where you left off in a document. When you reopen a file you’ve been working on, Word shows you where you last worked and lets to jump to that place with one click.

It’s essentially a bookmark for your documents, and it’s a fantastic tool for anyone working on a lengthy project over several days or weeks. Microsoft Office has long been the standard for those who use word processors, spreadsheet tools and presentation builders at work. That’s because Word, Excel and PowerPoint are packed with advanced features, like mail merge, detailed charts and animated slides that are missing or limited with other programs.

And for many people, Excel is the gold standard program for crunching large amounts of data. Not to mention, Office was designed to work both online and off, so you can do your work no matter where you go.

Google Docs can work offline, but you’ll need to have opened your file before you go off the grid. Google has improved Docs over the years, adding new features and making it work better, it still pales in comparison to what Office has been able to do for the last decade.

If your work requires a full range of features and offline editing, it’s still very hard to beat Office. Office introduces real-time typing to Word, where two or more people can work on a document at once, and you can see what everyone is typing. Each person is shown as a colored text cursor with their name that moves as they type. This works well, and as long as every person editing has a stable Internet connection, you’ll see changes and additions almost immediately.

Multiple people can work at once, but this feature is only available in Word. Google Docs has had this same feature for several years now, and what makes it better is that it works in Google’s presentation app Slides and in Sheets, the spreadsheet app. That gives Google the upper hand here — at least for the time being. Microsoft has worked hard to make sharing much more seamless in Office , but unfortunately, it still doesn’t feel as easy as sharing in Google Docs.

Type in an email address and decide if that person can only view the file or edit it, and click share to send them a link to the file. It links to the document, which opens in a separate window, not a pane.

And, of course, it would be nice if the feature were ubiquitous across Office. But with markup, live collaboration, and OneNote linking, Office should make it easier to recall earlier meetings that have blurred together. Normally, Outlook would seem to pale compared to the leading lights of Office. At one time, email was both the medium and the metaphor for managing business relationships.

Now, however, modern social networks threaten that model—and Microsoft has no answer to that. Microsoft has added a number of small conveniences to Outlook For one thing, if you want to add an attachment, Outlook pulls down a list of recently used and modified files across all of the Office applications.

If you want to email an enormous file say, megabytes Outlook will email a link to the file stored in OneDrive, rather than clogging your network and mail folders by emailing the file itself. Microsoft also added a more important addition, Clutter, a sort of second-level spam folder. Clutter, which has been available on the Outlook. You can turn it off entirely if you so choose.

The flagship feature of Outlook is a new Groups feature, which carves out a portion of Outlook—and Office, to a lesser extent—into a series of small, flexible teams that you or a colleague can create. Instead of exchanging emails, the dynamic here is more conversational. So it probably makes the most sense to view them as a cohesive whole.

At the bottom, Outlook now adds Groups. Groups can represent an ad-hoc team formed to hammer out a feature request, an entire sales organization, or anything in between. But with Groups, you can create a shared calendar and OneDrive, then track the progress of various group projects via the Planning Hub.

I right-clicked the Group label to form one. An admin can also take care of this for you. Outlook asks you to create a group name, and at least in my organization, assigned it its own email address. For now, much of this takes place at Outlook. Using it via Chrome gave my boss some problems, but Edge worked fine.

In general, I like Groups, if managed appropriately. Microsoft put some thought into how Groups messages are passed, allowing you to send in-Group email known as Conversations into your general Outlook inbox—or in its own workflow. Outlook already offers a number of ways to connect with contacts, via messaging Skype, email, or phone.

Some people want to see all that communication in a single, unified interface; others want to break it out into discrete conversations.

Groups allows you to do both. This took me just a few minutes to create, and it looks great. Delve is sort of an odd fusion of OneDrive and Lync. One portion of it is devoted to surfacing relevant documents that you know are buried somewhere in your Outlook folders, while the other will show you more information about a particular colleague, such as her resume and where she sits in the organizational hierarchy.

If you open a contact card in Outlook and view the Sharepoint profile, it will open this Delve page. But in my own workflow, Delve automatically shows me the documents I use most frequently. Delve does find documents I need, and I like that—but it also displayed a flurry of test documents I had created and will never use again. Not so great. In the preview build we were given, I had to navigate there from a fake email sent to my demo persona. Its card-based format reminded me a bit of Trello, although the functionality is probably closer to Zoho Projects.

On my demonstration Surface, I was able to create tasks, assign them to individuals to be due on a given date, and upload any files or links that would be relevant to the task at hand. Click on each category to drill down to the specific task at hand. A bar chart also allows you to see the number of tasks each individual has assigned to them, a nice way to ensure the available resources are used correctly. Many of the other applications within Office integrate quite closely with Skype for Business, the app that essentially replaced Lync last year.

Skype offers you a nice, clean interface to chat with a colleague, share files, and even share your screen although this feature lagged a bit when I was chatting with Microsoft representatives. In this sense, Office Planner feels unfinished—which I suppose it is. Microsoft told me that it sees Office Planner and Groups as the avenues of private, intra-team conversation, and Yammer as the means to communicate hitting milestones to the rest of the company at large.

From my personal standpoint, I can see PCWorld using Groups to invite attendees to a CES planning session, sharing a meeting calendar, using a shared OneDrive folder for images and press materials, then dissolving it after the show finishes.

That sounds very useful. What worries me a bit, however, is that Groups seems to assume that one person equals one job. In a large organization, that may be true. But some of the appeal of Groups is the ability to form a Group as one needs it. At a business employing 60 people, you could conceivably have a number of groups with different combinations of a handful of people, but focused on different tasks.

Formalizing numerous, different interpersonal group relationships with shared calendars, emails and the like—and then trying to figure out what to do with them as time passes—well, it seems like it could all become very complex, very quickly.

Sway allows you to create a newsletter-esque layout that emphasizes graphics, with photos used as backdrops and transitions sliding in to introduce new sections. Sway starts out simply enough: You pick a title and a backdrop image. Embedding an image is as easy as typing a search term in a box, then letting Bing or PicSay find a Creative Commons image for you.

Sway is designed for the modern Web, and sometimes it becomes a bit pretentious in that regard. Sway seems geared at the education market, but it lacks a word-count feature—one metric most teachers use. But you can see that all of these products could be made in Word, or via a Web app or online service.

I was also a little concerned about this error message, which I discovered on checking a Microsoft-authored template for version information:. Office has another alternative: the Office Mobile apps.

After all, if your document is saved to OneDrive, you can easily pull it up in either Word Mobile as well as Word Note: Editing documents on Word Mobile and the other apps is only free for Windows devices under 10 inches or less, unless you have an active Office subscription. Editing is free for iOS and Android users. Otherwise, Windows users without an active Office subscription can view documents. But for my own use, I prefer using Excel Mobile to Excel , precisely because my needs are basic.

Summing a column is performed automatically, for example. In Word Mobile, I can track changes, check spelling, add footnotes, and even perform the Smart Lookup function built into the paid version of Word. But—and this is somewhat important—the Web apps will be one of the first platforms to receive new features, precisely because they can be updated on the fly. Features like Clutter, which I really like, debuted on the Web months before the dedicated apps.

The same goes for saving documents into Dropbox: You can do that via the web apps, and even Office for iOS and Android, but not Office , yet. You do make a sacrifice or two in choosing the built-in Office Mobile apps. You can only work on one document at a time.

The real-time collaboration Microsoft boasts about? Not there, although you can still track changes as before. OneNote Mobile also lacks one of my favorite features: voice recording. Office has become siloed: Writers use Word religiously, while number-crunchers plumb the depths of Excel.

Sales and marketing gurus live in PowerPoint. A generalist might be able to gin up a basic spreadsheet, but stop short of fancier techniques, such as pulling in live, disparate data sources to support a proposal. But what are they? And what are they good for? Microsoft would love for you to subscribe to Office , and the company promises a steady stream of monthly improvements to keep you hooked.

Office never told you. Office Home allows you a license to install on five devices, five tablets, and five phones, plus a terabyte of free storage. This Microsoft tutorial video is somewhat of an ugly example. But with better promotion of what you can do with Office, adoption should only increase. I think that Microsoft needs to take the next step, though, and start showing, rather than telling, how users can use these features to best effect.

 
 

2016 microsoft word review free

 
This free online Microsoft Word course teaches you about the core features This course reviews advanced page layout options, linking text boxes. Bottom line. Microsoft Word is an excellent update to what is, for most users, an important business tool. Changes to the program’s user.

 

– Microsoft Word – Free download and software reviews – CNET Download

 
And it autosaves your work, so you don’t lose it. Comments are threaded, so you can carry on a conversation in a file. Otherwise, click the link below to open it in a browser tab, and then the Download button to open it in Microsoft Store on your Windows computer. Otherwise, you might want to consider these fresh alternatives to Microsoft Office. To grab the app, head to the Microsoft Store and search for Word Mobile.