Windows 8: Out of the Box

Chapter 8. Using Windows 8 for Work

Whether it’s for work, college, or personal finance, Windows has always been the choice for being productive and getting things done. In Chapter 4, I showed you how you can snap two desktop windows side by side, which is a great way to compare two documents, and it’s a feature that I use all the time.

There is much more that you can do with the desktop, though, and I’ll show you how in this chapter. What’s more, almost every version of Windows 8 comes with a free copy of Microsoft Office, either the Starter edition that you will find on desktops, laptops, and Windows 8 Pro tablets, or a more extensive yet still free version on Windows 8 consumer tablets.

Top Tips from This Chapter

1. The free Office Starter that comes with Windows 8 is suitable for many of the things home users will want to do in Word and Excel.

2. The Ribbon can be operated by touch and its tabs group similar functions together.

3. The Mobility Center has tools that can dramatically extend the battery life of a laptop or tablet.

Using Microsoft Office in Windows 8

As I’ve said in the introduction to this chapter, there are different versions of Office provided with your Windows 8 computer depending on what version of Windows 8 you have. I’ll discuss the two different versions later in this chapter.

Microsoft Office is based around the company’s Ribbon interface, which was first seen in Office 2007. This is an alternative way to access a program’s features to the older-style drop-down menus. If ...