The new Office is packed with features that students will love and Word is no exception!  Today, we present the Top 10 reasons we think students will be head over heels for the new Word.  Download the Customer Preview today and tell us which of these is your favorite new feature!

Like you, we here on the Word team are pumped about Windows 8 and Windows RT. We’re equally excited to be shipping Office Home & Student 2013 RT with Windows RT devices. Knowing this, one question you might have is: “How is Word being optimized for Windows RT?”

If you haven’t seen it already, definitely check out Josh and David’s blog post about our overall experience with Building Office for Windows RT. In that post, they highlight much of the work that teams in Office did to optimize our apps for Windows RT. In this post, I’ll further highlight some of the work that the Word team did to make Word 2013 on Windows RT great.

In Office 2010, we introduced a brand new SharePoint service called Word Automation Services. Word Automation Services allows developers to harness the capabilities of Word on the server. Word Automation Services allows developers to perform the following types of file operations:

• Converting between document formats (ex. DOC to DOCX)
• Converting to fixed formats (ex. PDF)
• Updating the Table of Contents, the Table of Authorities, and index fields
• Recalculating all field types
• Importing “alternate format chunks”
• Setting the compatibility mode of the document to the latest version or to previous versions of Word

 We created this service because we wanted to help developers avoid the challenges of automating the Word client application as documented by this famous Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757.

In Office 2013, we’ve made improvements to Word Automation Services, based on some great user feedback, which we think will make the service even easier to use and allows the service to accommodate additional scenarios.

How many times have you tried to move an image or a chart in Word and gotten frustrated when it unexpectedly landed somewhere other than where it was dropped?  Working with images is one of the top pain points that we hear about from customers, so in the new Word, we’ve simplified the experience with 3 great new features:

• The Layout Options button gives you quick access to change how your image interacts with the rest of your document.
• Live layout lets you see your document’s new layout in real time as you reposition, resize or rotate images

• Alignment guides help you visually align your images with important areas of the document

We know you put a lot of effort into making a document look great. At the end of the day, you want a polished document that invites people in. One that is professional looking, with obvious attention to the details, and that you can be proud to share with your friends, family, colleagues, coworkers, or the world. In this release, we wanted to make it easier than ever for you to create those documents.

In this post, I’ll talk about how new starting options, templates, and built-in content can make it easier to go from start to finish using the new Word in the Office Customer Preview.

You want to meet real time to write or refine a Word document but often times the people you need to meet with cannot be at the same place at the same time. With the growing usage of messaging and audio/video conferencing software, people are collaborating from multiple locations. Whether you’re a student who needs to finish a class project with your peers, a small business owner who wants to share a contract with clients, or a family member writing a holiday letter with someone in another location, we know it’s important for any Word user to be able to easily share and work together on their documents.

We set out to create a simple, rich sharing experience that gives the presenter confidence their attendees are able to follow along, wherever they are in the document. By adding an interactive communication channel, such as IM or voice/video applications, you can create a complete real time collaboration experience. The Office Presentation Service is free for all Office 2013 customers to use; all you need is a Microsoft account and Microsoft Office 2013.

There are lots of reasons to spend time styling your document – you may be trying to follow a publishing requirement, to make your document stand out, or just make it easier to read. In Word 2013, we’ve made it easier than ever for you to quickly change the look of your entire document until you have it just right.  While the styles gallery has been available on the Word home tab since Word 2007, some people just assume styles are meant for people who want big blue text.  As it turns out, that’s not true. I’m here to tell you that Styles are handy, and if you use them to format your text as your write your document, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the improvements in Word 2013.

It’s all about the little things. In Word 2013, we made improvements to how you'd work with tables to make your lives a little bit easier by simplifying the scenarios for formatting a table and quickly adding rows or columns to it. Read on to find out more!

Following on our introductory post to Word 2013 by Tristan Davis, here we discuss how we've polished the scenarios around reviewing documents using comments and tracked changes. We've improved how we display comments and revisions, and added some nifty features to make your scenarios easier. Read on to see what it's all about.

In this week's webinar, we'll spin the wheels of Word 2013, something you can also do right now during our free Customer Preview.

What you will learn

• Improvements to enjoy document reading
• New ways to share your document
• Adding video...