Videos are a great way to engage a reader, tell a story, invoke emotion, and communicate effectively. They are found all over the web (news articles, blogs, websites, etc.) and are a great way to enhance documents you send digitally. In the new Word, we added the ability to insert web video directly into your documents, allowing you to create rich, interactive output that pairs your words with video whenever appropriate.

Since the Office Customer Preview was announced a few weeks ago, we’ve talked quite bit about the vision for the product and the new features that you’ll be able to take advantage of when you try it out.  One area that we invested heavily in this release, but has remained under the radar, is our work on the layout engine that Word uses.  When I say “layout”, I’m referring to the way that Word places everything onto the page.  The position of everything from a single character of text to a complex table is calculated during layout and then the results are displayed on the screen. This technology really forms the core of our product.

In past releases, we introduced Compatibility Mode to help ensure layout fidelity between versions.  With this release, we went a step further.  While we still have Compatibility Mode, files upgraded to Word 2013 mode use a new and much improved layout engine.

These days there is a lot of excitement about touch computing. In the past we have had some limited touch support in Word, but this time we went deeper and made some touch specific improvements to make Word shine on Windows 8.  Word is a powerful application that has spent the last few decades being fine-tuned for mouse and keyboard interaction. This release, our goal was to enable the scenarios that are most common on touch devices without disrupting the productivity of mouse and keyboard users. So, although we couldn’t rewrite every feature to be touch first, we were able to cover the basics.

We’ve all received PDF files with content that we wanted to reuse. This means that most of us have been disappointed by the difficulty of getting good content out of a PDF. For example, if you try to copy and paste table rows from a PDF viewer into Word, you frequently end up with a collapsed single line of text.  Most existing PDF viewers, in essence, limit people who use PDF’s to a “look but don’t touch” experience.  PDF Reflow, a new feature in the upcoming release of Word, changes the landscape by letting you convert PDFs into editable Word documents.

One of the things Word has always excelled at is content authoring, but there’s more to a document than just writing, reviewing and collaborating. Historically, many documents were received and read in a paper form, but the increasing ubiquity of digital devices has led to a world in which many documents never even reach a printer. Word has long had tools tailored for reading, but this release of Word we wanted to go even further to improve the modern consumption experience.

Last Monday, we announced the Office Customer Preview - now that the Preview is publically available, Tristan Davis, Senior Lead Program Manager, kicks off a series of Word 2013-focused posts, giving you an introduction to the new release, as well as the underlying philosophy that drove the investments the team made.

In this week's webinar, we explain what a watermark is and how to insert one using Word 2010. We also go over the different types of watermarks you can insert, such as text or picture watermarks.

What you will learn in this webinar:

• How to insert a "Draft" watermark to pages
• How to insert a picture watermark
• How to add a watermark to just one page

Have you ever skipped a meeting and then gotten nominated to take on a task because you weren't there to defend yourself? My rowing club asked me to create a calendar "with my great photos." I know enough to know that I'm an amateur photographer, so imagine my delight when I discovered Picture Tools in Word 2010 which helped me make-over my images. Here are five easy tips for changing a snapshop into something snappier.

Have you ever proudly sent off a document to your boss only to discover that you forgot a section? Adding it back is simple, but how do you include it in the table of contents? It only takes a minute (or less) if you know the steps.

Word makes it really easy to create a Table of Contents (TOC). It's a two-step process: first you assign a "style" to each heading in your document, and then you tell Word where to create the TOC.