Office 2013 – top features of Microsoft Office 2013

On my personal experience I can confidently say that; any person in the world who is new to computer and want to learn something about computer then he /she always demands for learning Microsoft Office. The reason is also obvious. MS Office simplifies many day to day activities for all of us. Every new launch of ms office has taken a step towards simplifying our life tremendously.

Yes! I agree that, to get comfortable with new versions of ms office; it takes time. But once you are through, then there is no problem. I am sure every one of us must be having same kind of experience with ms office various versions.

If you observe the history of ms office releases, the changes in different versions were not big or they were addendum to the existing features. However, I think Microsoft now has decided to change everything with release of windows 8 and Ms Office 2013 is no exception to that. MS Office 2013 is going to be the most ambitious release from Microsoft.

Based on my personal experience after interacting with various Microsoft product lovers, people tend to get confused with new releases and various features. Here in this post I am just trying to simplify the catchy features of Ms Office 2013.

What is Office 2013 –? What is difference between office 2013 and office 365?

Office 2013 is basically a desktop based application as opposed to Office 365 which is subscription based office version. As office 2013 is desktop based, it will be required to be installed on your devices be it, laptop, tablet, desktop Pc or anything. Office 2013 is traditional office product from Microsoft. Office 365 is subscription based cloud service which is not required to be installed on your devices. Office 365 delivers the office 2013 programs as a part of subscription service via Microsoft cloud.

Office 365 is an online subscription service that provides email, shared calendars, the ability to create and edit documents online, instant messaging, web conferencing, a public website for your business, and internal team sites—all accessible anywhere from nearly any device.

If you have Office 2013 installed then you can quickly configure it to work with Office 365 services. Office 365 can also be configured with 2007 and 2010. Office 365 is not office 2013. 

For example, If you use Office 2013 alone, the document will be saved on your device or computer. Hence it cannot be access anytime unless you carry your device everywhere. If you have Office 2013 configured to Office 365; then you can save the document to say SkyDrive and can access anytime on any device even if you don’t have your device or laptop or tablet with you.

This is the main difference between the two.

 Now let’s have a look at the features of Office 2013.

WPF Binding – Element Binding example - Enable Disable Control based on another control property in WPF

Gone are the days for me to work on Azure. 3 weeks back started with WPF. I have been in web technology for last 5 years and now suddenly shifted to windows applications using WPF.

Now struggling with binding, converters and what not. Anyways, I have started to digest simple WPF concepts one of which I am going to discuss here.

I want to bind a controls property “IsEnabled” to another controls property value. As an example, I am taking the textbox control to enable or disable based on the selction of value in drop down. Ohh sorry, combobox!!! (drop down we generally refer in web application!!)

Lets create a simple WPF application, add two controls viz. combobox and textbox. I created a simple class having 2 properties value and text. This class I will use to bind to combo box. The class is as shown –

public class MyItem

    {

        public int Value { get; set; } 

        public string Text { get; set; }

    } 

    public class MyItems : ObservableCollection<MyItem>

    {

    }