It's been said that "a dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work." We're honored to see all of our sweat, determination, and hard work pay off with the great reviews that the new Office has garnered since Microsoft released Office 365 Home Premium to customers last month. 

Already, Office 365 is racking up the awards. PC Magazine gave Office 365 Home Premium its Editors' Choice award, saying "most of the changes are extremely positive." Likewise, ITProPortal gave Office 365 Home Premium its "Best Buy Award," saying it "trounces the competition from Google Docs."

It's true that you can create PowerPoint presentations without using Slide Masters or even knowing what they are, but they save so much time and effort that we think you'll be glad to know about them. In this week's webinar, we'll show you how to master the Slide Master--a built-in tool that controls the look of your PowerPoint presentation and keeps it consistent throughout.

See the trailer or click "read more" below to the entire webinar.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar:

• Stop cutting-and-pasting in PowerPoint
• What a Slide Master does...

With SharePoint 2013, you can brand your SharePoint publishing site using the web technologies you know, the tools you like, and the devices you want, making it easier than ever before to get started as a SharePoint designer or developer. And, for current SharePoint pros, don't worry. The work you've put in learning SharePoint thus far is still very applicable and your knowledge of the SharePoint Publishing Page model is still incredibly useful. Read on for an overview of how you can easily use SharePoint 2013's Design Manager and Device Channels alongside the web design tools you're most comfortable with to define your company's online brand. While keeping the same page rendering infrastructure, we've made three major enhancements to how you brand a SharePoint Publishing site.

With the announcement of easier collaboration on SkyDrive, sharing files with friends, family and colleagues just got a whole lot easier! Now you can share a link to your Excel files with anyone and they can edit the workbooks without needing to sign in with a Microsoft account, even at the same time! Read on to find out how to put this functionality to work for you.

If you've been using Office Web Apps for a while, you know that we continually make improvements to them, even since our big update last October. And now that you don't have to sign in, you can try out the 4 latest updates right here, right now.

Don't have time to watch all the Oscar nominated movies, but want the inside scoop on the likely winners? Try the new Oscars Ballot Predictor app, which brings a bit of Hollywood fun to Excel 2013 and gives you a competitive edge at your Oscars party.

The interactive app lets you see the Oscar nominees, vote for your picks, and check out the predicted winners in each of the 24 categories. Your selections are recorded on a printable ballot sheet that you can take to your Oscars party to compare with your friends' choices and see how your odds stack up.

A few weeks ago, we announced the new Office for consumers, including the all new Office 365 Home Premium, Office 365 University for college and university students, and traditional Office suites: Office Home and Student 2013, Office Home and Business 2013 and Office Professional 2013. Since then we've received questions about the number of installations people get with the traditional Office suites, transferability, and how they compare to Office 2010. With that in mind, we want to offer some clarity on the matter, to help customers make the best purchasing decision.

At this week's inaugural Lync Conference, Microsoft is celebrating a people-centric vision for the future of communications technology, including the announcement that Lync-Skype connectivity for presence, IM and voice will be available to all Lync users by June. We have been honored by the rate of Lync adoption and encourage you to check out the new customer references we have for Lync 2013, available as of today.

Last summer, we released a preview of Outlook.com, a new modern email service from Microsoft. Since then, we've been humbled by the fast pace of adoption with over 60 million people already actively using Outlook.com. During the same period, we've received lots of feedback and made many improvements. Today, we're excited to announce the next step in this journey: Outlook.com is coming out of preview and people everywhere can get started and give it a try at Outlook.com.

Access 2013 web apps are great for collaborating around a common set of data. When people work together in this way, the changes that one person makes to the data often require the attention of someone else. In this article, we'll describe a technique to build e-mail notifications into your Access 2013 web app using the power of SQL Server and a third-party service called Zapier. You can use this technique in your apps to make sure that the right people are informed when your shared data changes.