Improve productivity and creativity with Office Apps

BY: ALBERTO LUGO

If you’re already using Microsoft Office 2013 but not aware of “Office Apps”, then read on to know how you can improve your productivity and creativity when it comes to managing your documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Many of you already know and work day-to-day with Microsoft Office products, such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. What are Office Apps? Office Apps are applications that you can download and integrate in your Microsoft Office products; similar to the apps that you can download and use on your smartphone.

What kind of apps are available? The market, or the “Office Store” is full of applications that you can use:

  • Dictionary or translator app for Word
  • Extra graphs/charts, maps and payment management for Excel
  • Graphics and polls for PowerPoint
  • LinkedIn integration or document digital signing for Outlook

Here are examples of a couple of apps I use that integrate with Office.

Word

We can use apps to look up information about our document content without leaving Word, and by only selecting the text, with the Wikipedia app:

Wikipedia

There’s also a Word translator, to rapidly translate and insert the translated text inside the document with Microsoft Translator:

Microsoft Translator

Excel

For Excel, we can use extra graphs/charts, or stunning maps with little effort from Bing Maps:

Bing Maps

Or show information that visually appealing and quick to understand with People Graph:
People Graph

PowerPoint

For our presentations, we can add dynamic polls to interact with our audience with Poll Everywhere:

Poll Everywhere

Or to show a “Word Cloud” depending on the presentation’s current topics with Pro Word Cloud:

Pro Word Cloud

Outlook

Make your emails present more relevant information about the senders with the LinkedIn app:

LinkedIn

Or use the DocuSign app to add digital signing functionality to your document attachments:

DocuSign

I like Office Apps, how do I get them?

If you have Office, version 2013, you can navigate directly from the product you’re using. Example with Word:

Microsoft Office Apps

Or navigate to the following link and download the app you want to use, or see all the apps available by product: https://store.office.com.