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.

With the enhancements to Excel Services as part of the new Office, we now support query table refresh. Workbooks with query tables now can be seamlessly refreshed on the go from any browser! No need to convert your query table to a pivot table or download a workbook to desktop Excel client to refresh your query table. In other words, broad sharing of workbooks throughout an organization just got easier.

In this week's webinar you’ll learn about nifty tips and timesavers from Microsoft MVPs. These “Most Valuable Professionals” share their real-world technical expertise with the community. We have a few tips and may even have a few stop on by to chat as we broadcast from their annual summit in Redmond, Washington.

This webinar was recorded at the MVP Summit in Redmond, where we spotlighted customers’ favorite new features in Office 365 Home Premium and engaged in a live Q&A about Office 365.

What you will learn at Monday’s webinar:

• New features in Office
• Customer’s tell us...