Today is the wrap-up of Office 2013. Thanks for all of the positive emails you sent about this series of articles. Also, thanks for the ideas for future columns…keep reading, there is a good chance you will see them here eventually.
First, two tips I received from readers need mentioning. Jennifer reminded me I should tell all of the Excel users the multiple workbooks in the same window feature is now gone. YAY!
For years I have been the MS Office go to guy. I cannot number the times I have gotten the question. You know the one, "How can I open two workbooks and see them in separate instances of Excel, say one on my right screen and one on my left, at the same time?"
There is a workaround for it in pre-2013 Offices. Write if you want to know how. But with Excel 2013, the default setting is to open a new workbook in separate instances of Excel. This means that you have two detached versions of Excel running at the same time so you can look at both or copy data from one book to the other.
Next Matt at JMU said, "You know you wrote about Outlook not opening the reply, reply to all and forwards in a separate window? There should be a setting in Outlook somewhere to fix that because it is a pain." Well, Matt was correct. This feature is called, "Reading Pane Compose" and it can be thwarted. On an individual basis click Reply (or Reply to all or Forward) and you will see a small link in the upper-left corner of the compose area which says, "Pop Out." When clicked to reply, email pops into its own separate window just as in the past. If you want that to happen every time with every email go to File tab, click Options, then the Mail link in the navigation bar on the left. Scroll about half way down that page until you see, "Replies and forwards" and uncheck, "Open replies and forwards in a new window." You are done, easy.
Office 2013 is the desktop only version to be installed on one computer. Office 365 is a cloud version that pairs up with the Office application. The previous versions of Office 365 had a much smaller feature list than the desktop version. This means you just could not do as many things with the cloud version and if you were not online you could not use it; but now you can.
Let’s look at the pricing for Office 2013 and Office 365.
Office 2013 is more expensive than Office 365 and 2013’s license is only good for one computer. Office 2013 Pro which includes the entire Office suite retails for $400.
Office 365 comes two ways. 1) Home Premium for $100 per year. 2) Small Business Premium for $150 per year. Both have the full Office 2013 Pro suite for your computer but up to five people can use Office 365 Home Premium on up to five systems.
Small Business Premium also has five licenses; however, it is billed per user per year. Each user can install and use Office on up to five PCs, but the licenses can’t be shared with other users. This version also includes Exchange (for email management), SharePoint (for making an internal web space), and Lync (a messaging platform for the office).
To me, the pricing is a mess but if you need Office for business the Small Business version may be the way to go.
