Office 365 Home Premium is now available to everyone as a subscription service, giving busy people and families new ways to get more done on the go. Similar to how Bing is powering apps on Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox ,we created the Bing Apps for Office, which are free Bing-powered apps that can be used with the new Office 365 Home Premium.
Our goal is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of knowledge Bing has assembled for search. You can see this today with features like: voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using your phone’s camera with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search with Bing on Windows 8, With Bing Apps for Office we are introducing ways for you to be more productive without having to leave the applications.
There are currently five Bing Apps for Office including: Bing Finance for Excel, Bing Maps for Excel, Bing Image Search for Word, Bing News Search for Word and Bing Dictionary for Excel and Word.
Bing Maps for Office helps people plot location data on a Bing Map. It a data visualization tool for Excel that lets you use location names and map controls so you can zoom in and out of the map using touch or your mouse. You can adjust the map view to road or birds eye. Imagine overlaying census data on a state map.
Bing Finance (Beta) for Office helps you take control of your finances by letting you build a finance portfolio table in Excel. You can input stock symbols and customize the fields you’d like to display by selecting from a wide range of data columns, including current price and news.
Bing News Search for Office lets you search for news and related videos from within a Word document. Bing search results can be inserted into the document by clicking on the insert plus icon. You can also add frequent searches to your favorites list.
Bing Dictionary (English) for Office continuously discovers and distills high quality language knowledge so you have the latest definitions and spellings available. Aren’t sure of how to spell something? Simply enter words as they sound and Bing can suggest letters, words or phrases, optionally specified by part-of-speech.
Bing Image Search for Office allows you to search for images on the web from within your Word document. You can search for images by selecting text in the document or typing in the search box. Results are displayed in a grid and when you click on a result, a larger preview is displayed at the bottom with additional details and options. Any result can be inserted into the document at the location of your cursor by clicking on the insert plus icon.
The new Office is full of features that help people simplify their lives and find time to do the things they want. Get Office 365 Home Premium today, try out the Bing Apps and let us know what you think.
– The Bing Team