Bing apps for Office 365 released

Alan Buckingham
Feb 1, 2013
Microsoft
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This week Microsoft rolled out the brand new Office suite. While most of us were expecting Office 2013, and we did get that, the focus was mostly on Office 365 Home Premium, which will act as a subscription service for $99 per year US -- the full pricing details were already covered by Ghacks. The company made that a better deal than Office 2013, indicating that it would prefer users to go in that direction and make Office a service as opposed to a desktop app suite.

Now a set of Bing apps for Office 365 Home Premium have been unveiled. This brings Bing even more to the forefront of Microsoft products, as it is already a big part of Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox. According to Bing, "our goal is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of knowledge Bing has assembled for search".

What is included

First, users will get access to Bing Maps, which will integrate into Excel and allow the user to add location data to a file. Readers can then zoom in and out of the map to view roads and get a birds-eye view. What use is that? Bing envisions it this way -- "Imagine overlaying census data on a state map".

Bing Finance also integrates into Excel. As the name suggests, it will allow the user to easily create their own financial plan. Sort of an answer to Microsoft Money, which was killed off sometime back.

Bing News Search will allow the user to search from within a Word document. Results can be inserted into the document and users can set up favorite searches.

bing apps office 365

Bing Dictionary is currently English only. It is handy because it not only handles spell-checking but also allows you to enter words as they sound and receive a correct spelling. "Bing can suggest letters, words or phrases, optionally specified by part-of-speech".

Finally there is Bing Image Search. As the name suggests, it allows you to search for an image by simply selecting text in a Word document.  The results are displayed in a column to the right of the page. You can click an image for a larger view and also select one to insert into your document.

Conclusion

Office 365 Home Premium is not only the direction Microsoft is trying to steer customers, but probably is truly the best option for users. That is personal opinion of course, and you may feel differently. However, with the addition of the Bing apps and likely many more features coming, it is shaping up to be the most usable Office version yet. The Bing features certainly are a big part of that. Each of these apps is available separately from the Office Store.

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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