(Reuters) - Samsung Electronics(005930.KS) is set to take the wraps off a sequel to its popular Galaxy Note smartphone at an event on August 29, about two weeks before the possible debut of Apple's(AAPL.O) new iPhone.

The two arch rivals are bracing for a full-blown battle with the expected rollouts of the two key models coming as they lock horns in a high-stakes patent trial in the United States.


"We plan to unveil the next Galaxy Note at the Samsung Mobile Unpacked event in Berlin on August 29," a Samsung spokesman said on Friday, without elaborating. The event will take place two days before the opening of Europe's biggest consumer electronics trade fair IFA.


South Korean media reports speculate the new Galaxy Note may feature an unbreakable, 5.5-inch display - slightly larger than the current one - as well as a faster processor and a much better camera.
Samsung, once a laggard in the smartphone market, overtook Apple last year to become the world's largest smartphone maker. The South Korean firm is looking to defend its supremacy by refreshing its line-up ahead of the launch of the fifth version of Apple's iPhone, widely expected to be released in October.


Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S III in May, while Apple is planning a major product launch on Sept 12, stoking speculation the company may announce the sale of its redesigned iPhone.
Samsung is estimated to have increased smartphone shipments to 50.5 million in the April to June quarter of this year, nearly double the 26 million iPhones sold.


Apple shipments in the June quarter tumbled 26 percent on the previous quarter as the European economy sagged and consumers held off on buying ahead of the release of the iPhone 5.


The two tech titans also started a trial in a U.S. court this week in a patent battle triggered by Apple's lawsuit last year claiming that Samsung slavishly copied Apple's smartphones and tablets. Samsung has countersued.

[Updated]
Microsoft announced its Outlook webmail service this week, and it's a suprisingly robust new webmail client. But can it hold a torch to the current king of webmail, Gmail? To give you a better idea of how they stack up, here's a feature-by-feature comparison of Outlook vs. Gmail.


Feature-by-feature, the two services are remarkably similar. Here's a quick rundown:




Now for the more detailed breakdown.


Interface



Let's start with the first thing you're going to notice when you log into Outlook for the first time: the interface. Most of us are familiar with how Gmail looks and feels. Outlook's not entirely different, but it is a little simpler.


Outlook's Clean, Email-Centric Interface
Outlook is all about email. That's it. When you pop into Outlook, you're shown your email account and nothing else. You still get ads on the sidebar, but overall, it's a far less cluttered interface than Gmail (and it's way less cluttered than Hotmail) because Outlook isn't seeking to integrate with a bunch of other services. Ads are a little less creepy because they're not based on keywords in your inbox.


Gmail's Google-centric Interface
We all know Gmail's interface pretty well at this point. You get personalized ads on the main inbox page on the top, and a sidebar with ads inside your messages. You also have the chat window on the side and the Google bar on the top. It's not complicated by any means, but the Google bar is certainly a bit of a distraction.


Storage Space and Attachments


Email storage space isn't as big of a deal as it once was, but if you're sending a lot of large files back and forth, a hefty amount of storage is helpful.


Outlook Has Nearly Unlimited Storage and a 100MB Limit on Attachments
You get a "virtually unlimited" amount of storage in Outlook. This means your storage capacity grows with your inbox, and you won't be throttled unless you appear to be a spammer. You can also attach a file of up to 100MB to any email. If you link your email to Skydrive you can attach files up to 300MB.


For incoming attachments, Outlook retains the Hotmail-style Active View. YouTube videos open inside the email, a group of photos becomes a slideshow, and you can open any Office document directly in your browser.


Gmail Comes with 10GB of Storage and a 25MB Limit on Attachments
Gmail's limits on storage and attachment size are a lot smaller than Outlook's. Out of the gates, most Gmail users get 10GB of free storage, and attachments are limited to just 25MB in size.


Like Outlook, Gmail opens up YouTube videos directly inline with the email. Gmail also handles Office documents in a similar way, and opens them in browser with the option to edit in Google Docs. Images in Gmail are handled with a pretty typical list view and don't offer the slick sideshow that Outlook has.


Email Organization


For power-users, the most important part of a good webmail client is automatic email filing and organization. Gmail locked this down a while ago, but Outlook brings some new ideas to the table.


Outlook's Quick View Folders and Sweep Features
Outlook doesn't have the robust filtering and labeling system that Gmail does, but it has a few tricks up its sleeve. One is the Quick View folders. These folders are automatically filled with certain types of emails (flagged, photos, office, shopping, etc). For instance, from the sidebar you can instantly search through the last few messages with photo attachments, or messages about Groupon deals. The Sweep feature from Hotmail also carries over to Outlook. Sweeping works a lot like Gmail's labels where emails from certain people or places automatically get filed away in a folder of your choosing.


Gmail's Filters, Labels, and Priority Messages
Using Gmail's labels is an easy way to keep track which emails are important and where they are. Better still, it's simple to set up an automatic filter that combs your incoming mail and distributes messages directly into those labels. If you're still overwhelmed, the priority inbox is a lifesaver for designating which emails really matter.


Junk Mail Control



Everyone hates spam, and no webmail client is worth using if it doesn't have extensive spam filtering. Of course, it's not just spam, it's also the junk you've signed up for that matters (newsletters, mailing lists, coupons, and whatever else).


Outlook's Spam Control and Clever Batch Filtering
Only time will tell how good Outlook's spam control is, but one of Outlook's coolest features is how it handles newsletter-type messages. Outlook automatically labels these messages and adds an unsubscribe button to them—even if the email doesn't include one its own. It's super handy for filtering out those emails you don't mind getting, but don't want alerts constantly.


Gmail's Spam Control and Filter Settings
Gmail has a pretty great spam filter and chances are you won't have too much trouble with spam. However, it doesn't have the same out-of-the-box batch filtering system for that clutter email you get. Still, it's super easy to set up your own filter for things like newsletters. Just create a new filter with words like, "opt-out, unsubscribe, privacy policy, or manage your account" and all your newsletters and coupons will filter off into their own section.


POP/IMAP Support

If you use a third-party email client on your desktop or mobile device, POP or IMAP support is crucial for keeping everything in order. Support for either also matters when you want to look at email without an active internet connection.


Outlook Doesn't Support IMAP, but Does Have ActiveSync and POP
Here's one of Outlook's major bummers: it doesn't support IMAP or POP. This means using certain third party email services (like Apple's default desktop Mail app) won't work. You can still follow the guide for using Hotmail with POP and that should work with Outlook. Instead, Outlook uses ActiveSync. Subsequently, you can only use email apps that support ActiveSync.


Gmail Has Full Support for Both IMAP and POP
Gmail supports both IMAP and POP and you can switch your settings on the fly very simply. This means you can synchronize between multiple email clients very easily. It also means you can access your archived email even when you're offline.


Search Capabilities




If you receive hundreds of emails a day, then a solid search capability is key with any webmail client. You don't want to spend more than a few minutes hunting down a lost email.


Outlook Has Simple, but Effective Search
Outlook's search capability is pretty straight-forward. You can search by a simple keyword, or pop into the advanced search and narrow it down by email address, subject, folders, and dates. It's nothing too complex, but it works well enough.


Gmail's Comprehensive Advanced Search Strings
Gmail's search strings are pretty advanced. The nice part about Gmail's search is that you don't have to worry about a bunch of input boxes. Instead, you can just type commands like, label, list, or filename, directly into the search box. It's fast and effective for quickly searching through email.


Social Integration

Email is already inherently social, but if you're looking to connect your various social accounts into your email, it's increasingly easy to do.


Outlook's Social Integration with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn & Skype (Coming Soon)
Outlook directly integrates with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. When you log in with any of those services, you'll see status updates, link mailbox accounts, and more. From the sidebar you can retweet people on Twitter, comment on Facebook status updates, and more. If you don't like the feature, it's easy enough not to enable. Check out the Video Below:


Gmail's Integrates with Google Plus Since Gmail is owned by Google, its social integration starts and stops with Google Plus. The two are tied together in a lot ways, including contact listings, email filtering, and more. Provided your friends are using Google Plus, you can even instantly create email groups to send mass messages to. Which One's Best for You? Outlook is the newcomer, but it's a no-brainer for anyone currently using Hotmail. It's also a good go-to for anyone who wants a webmail client that only does email. Its simplicity is its greatest strength. That said, Google's integration with all of Google's services is nice, and it's advanced features and customization options are more appealing to the power user.

If you consider yourself one of the lucky people who haven't been forced to switch to Timeline yet, know that your luck may soon run out. Facebook will force all of its 955 million accounts to use the new, more visual profile layout this fall in order to give everyone a consistent experience throughout the site.


Timeline was introduced in January of this year, catching some people by surprise. Facebook has been periodically forcing more and more users to make the switch since then; the rollout will merely be accelerated so that the transition will be complete in the next few months. Its recently announced revamped Photos interface is also part of the site-wide change, so expect to get the feature soon.


You'll know you're getting Timeline once Facebook shows you a prompt upon login, telling you when your new profile is going live. Make sure you edit your profile first before it goes public if you don't want friends and co-workers coming across old party pictures you forgot you had on your account.

Right on schedule, Windows 8 has been Released To Manufacturing. What this means is that Microsoft has completed the product development and the testing of Windows 8 operating system, and has started handing over its final code to its OEM partners, so that can start preparing their devices, which they can introduce at its General Availability on 26th October 2012.


Windows 8 has RTM’d

While we have reached our RTM milestone, no software project is ever really “done.” We will continue to monitor and act on your real world experiences with Windows 8—we’ve used the preview process to test out our servicing and we have every intent of doing a great job on this next important phase of the product. Hardware partners will continue to provide new devices and improve support for existing devices. PC makers no doubt have quite a bit in store for all of us as they begin to show off PCs specifically designed for Windows 8, said Steven Sinofsky.

Developers and IT professionals will be able to download the final version of Windows 8 via their MSDN or TechNet  subscriptions.

Customers with existing Microsoft Software Assurance for Windows, Microsoft Partner Network members, Microsoft Action Pack Providers  and Volume License customers without Software Assurance  will have access to Windows 8 on dates between August 16th and September 1st.


The Windows Blog has confirmed that users will be able to get Windows 8 starting on October 26th either by upgrading for $39.99 or when they purchase a new Windows 8 device, either a new PC or a new device.


If you buy an eligible Windows 7 PC today, you will be able to purchase an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99 (U.S.) through the Windows Upgrade Offer,




In a blog post this morning, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky cites unprecedented levels of testing for Windows 8.


He writes, “The previews of Windows 8 (Developer, Consumer, Release) have been the most widely and deeply used test releases of any product we have ever done. Over 16 million PCs actively participated in these programs, including approximately 7 million on the Release Preview that started 8 weeks ago. The depth and breadth of testing validate the readiness of Windows 8 for the market.”


Via Microsoft, here’s a timeline of next steps:

• August 15th: Developers will be able to download the final version of Windows 8 via your MSDN subscriptions.
• August 15th: IT professionals testing Windows 8 in organizations will be able to access the final version of Windows 8 through your TechNet subscriptions.
• August 16th: Customers with existing Microsoft Software Assurance for Windows will be able to download Windows 8 Enterprise edition through the Volume License Service Center (VLSC), allowing you to test, pilot and begin adopting Windows 8 Enterprise within your organization.
• August 16th: Microsoft Partner Network members will have access to Windows 8.
• August 20th: Microsoft Action Pack Providers (MAPS) receive access to Windows 8.
• September 1st: Volume License customers without Software Assurance will be able to purchase Windows 8 through Microsoft Volume License Resellers.
• October 26: Windows 8 will be available to consumers either by upgrading or on a new PC. Eligible Windows 7 PCs purchased now qualify for an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99 (U.S.) through the Windows Upgrade Offer.

The YouTube "Feather" beta is designed to give YouTube viewers the fastest viewing experience possible, at the expense of on-page features like expanding share boxes, collapsible comments, and a long list of related videos on the side of the page. The layout isn't drastically different, but if your problem with YouTube is that your videos buffer all the time and fail to load, the Feather beta may be worth a look.
We were hoping that YouTube comments would go away along with the rest of the page bloat, but we weren't so lucky. Instead of being collapsible, the first few comments are now fixed text on the page, and you can't upvote or downvote them. Aside from that, the page layout has been simplified, and the only buttons you have under a video now are the thumbs up/thumbs down/flag buttons. The "related videos" section on the right side of the page is pared down to five videos only, and most of the other interactive elements on the page, like pop-out menus and frames that slide open when you click on them, are gone.


YouTube tends to change its general layout so often that many of us don't notice the changes, but if the current iteration is too busy for you, or it takes too long to load a video, give the Feather beta a try at the link below. You can opt out of it at any time (you'll see a box below the related videos asking if you want out), and YouTube says that the Feather view may not work for all videos and is a work in progress. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think in the discussions below.

It's been about three years since Microsoft unveiled a new version of Office, and particularly with Windows 8 just months away from dropping, the software has been well overdue for an upgrade. Today, Redmond unveiled the latest edition -- Office 2013 (aka Office 15) -- which the company will be showing in a preview stage until the final version goes on sale (hit up the source link if you want to download it for yourself).


Perhaps the biggest news isn't any single feature Microsoft's added to Word (hello, easy YouTube embeds!), but how and where you'll access your files. With this version, the company is moving to a subscription-based model wherein your Office files are tied to your Microsoft ID. Once you sign up, you can download the various desktop apps to a certain number of devices and, as with Windows 8, your settings, SkyDrive files and even the place where you left off in a document will follow you from device to device. (It's telling, we think, that files now save to the cloud by default.) As you'd expect, too, this version is also more tablet-friendly than editions past, with a touch mode that widens the spacing between onscreen objects and flattens menus. In Word and PowerPoint, you'll also find a read-only mode that turns documents into full-screen editions, whose pages you can swipe through as you would an e-book or digital magazine.


Of course, Microsoft included plenty of granular updates like PDF editing and a behind-the-scenes Presenter View in PowerPoint. Fortunately for you, curious power users, we've been spending the better part of a week testing the software on a HCL Leaptop Business T39 Loaded up with Windows 8. So join us past the break where we'll give you a detailed breakdown of what's new, along with screenshots and detailed first impressions.


Overview


General look and feel


For those of you who thought Microsoft would completely overhaul Office ahead of the Windows 8 release, let's put it this way: if you could survive the transition to Ribbon menus in Office 2007, you'll quickly feel at home here. The Ribbon is, indeed, still the cornerstone of the Office experience, the visual metaphor permeating Word, Excel, Outlook and every other application in the suite.


Nonetheless, Microsoft has made some subtle changes to the UI, and they're all quite important. For starters, no matter what app you're using, you'll find your name and Microsoft account photo in the upper-right corner -- a reminder that the cloud is now the linchpin to the Office experience. From there, you can click the photo to adjust your account settings, swap in a new picture or even switch accounts.


Cloud integration


Being able to save to the cloud is hardly a new feature in Office, but for the first time saving to SkyDrive is the default, not the C drive. (SkyDrive Pro support is coming as well, says Microsoft.) And when you do hit save, you'll even see a progress bar on the bottom of the screen, confirming your latest draft made it safely to the cloud. As you'd expect, of course, the built-in options for saving to the cloud are limited to Microsoft's own services (SkyDrive and SharePoint). If you want to upload to Dropbox or Google Drive, you'll have to do it outside Office.


And since your files are stored online by default, it's fairly easy to share them on the web as well. Throughout these various Office apps, you can share your work with someone by sending them a URL, allowing them to follow along in a browser even if they don't happen to have Office installed on their local machine. To do this, just hit File, Share and choose either "Get link" or "Invite people," if you want them to have editing privileges. If, for some reason, the version fails to upload, you'll see a banner stretching across the top of the screen, prompting you to try that save again. From the same sharing menu, you can also post your work to a social network or email a document as an attachment, but that last bit isn't new.


Another perk: a feature called Resume Reading allows you pick up exactly where you left off, even if you resume editing on another device. (Okay, okay, Amazon's Kindle, for one, already bookmarks e-books this way, but isn't it a relief not to lose your place in a 44-item slide deck?) Though this feature doesn't apply to most apps in the Office family, you will see it in Word as well as PowerPoint.


Lastly, in various Office apps it's now easier to toss in a photo you found online. For example, Word is now integrated with Facebook and Flickr so that you pull pictures straight from there, instead of having to download it and then manually insert it into the doc. Obviously the only caveat is that you need an internet connection, so maybe save a Disney World photo or two on your desktop for offline emergencies.


Touch mode


Microsoft has made some subtle changes to the UI, and they're all quite important.
Across the various apps, too, you can use a new touch mode to make the software a little more finger-friendly. To expose this option, click on that small arrow in the upper-left corner of the screen -- you know, the one you already use to customize which icons are visible and which ones are hidden. Once you select touch mode, the icon that appears should look like a circle with a dotted line around it.


It's easy to imagine that, with the press of a button, Office would somehow take on more of a Metro-inspired look, with large, finger-friendly icons and -- dare we say it -- a more dumbed-down interface. Actually, the adjustments Office makes in touch mode are far more subtle. In short, enabling this mode widens the spacing between onscreen objects, making it less likely that you'll tap the wrong thing. This mode also causes various menus to flatten so that you can see options with less finger input involved. Again, that doesn't mean the objects on screen suddenly become larger to accommodate finger input, but this mechanism at least cuts down on the amount of tapping you'll end up doing.


Etc.
Spend enough time in Office 2013 and you'll notice dozens of visual flourishes that serve to give the software that extra bit of spit and polish. Office comes bearing glossy new icons, for one. Different apps like Word and PowerPoint have improved alignment guides, which become visible when you're inserting tables and other objects (we first noticed this while inserting a YouTube clip).


Also, animated transitions are everywhere: a slide of the screen when you hit the File tab, Excel charts growing before your eyes. As a Microsoft rep explained it, the idea is to offer some visual feedback to new users, who might not totally know their way around yet. Whether you require that kind of babying is debatable, but we're sure of this much: the animations are slick -- pretty, even -- and everything about the suite feels fast: fluid, brisk and refreshingly devoid of bugs.


Getting started


This isn't your old-school software installation, kids. The beauty of Office 2013's software-as-a-service model is that you get automatic updates and all that jazz you've come to expect from the other web-based services in your life. So it's fitting, then, that the installation begins not with a software download, but by selecting your preview version and then signing in with your Microsoft / Windows Live ID. Wait a few minutes for the setup to unfold, and then download Office to your various devices. (Take note: Office 2013 will run on Windows 7 and the Win8 Release Preview; it's not compatible with Vista, and it won't work with earlier builds of Windows 8, such as the Consumer Preview.) Armed with a speedy WiFi connection, we were up and running in five minutes and, again, the experience was smooth and crash-free.


This might be a good time to clarify the minimum hardware requirements. So long as you have 3.5GB of free disk space and an X86 or X64 system clocked at 1GHz or higher, you should be good to go. DirectX10 graphics are required, along with a minimum resolution of 1024 x 576. Microsoft also recommends 1GB of RAM for 32-bit systems, and 2GB for 64-bit machines.


Word


Look and feel



When you open Word for the first time, you'll notice some changes to that introductory start page. Now, the left-hand pane shows recent documents, while the area to the right showcases templates, some of them new. Of course, the thing you'll probably want most – a blank document – is still sitting in an easy-to-spot corner, toward the top of the screen.


Head on into a blank document and you'll see the Ribbon UI has made room for a new Design tab, which claims to let you make all your design changes in one place. Options include things like fonts, paragraph spacing, themes and adding watermarks to documents. Thankfully, though, Microsoft kept the feature where if you highlight text and then hover over it with your mouse, you'll see some pop-up controls right there, allowing you to change the font color and make other simple tweaks.


Tracking changes


Of all the new features in Office 2013, this is the one we Tech. In Total. editors hold dearest to our hearts. With this version of Office, tracking changes has been tweaked so that unless you're actively reading through changes and comments, all that noise simply shows up as a bunch of red lines. When you're ready to focus on editing, just click the line to expand the thread. And we do mean threads. Now, if you get into a back-and-forth with another editor ("Can we call this phone a Galaxy Note clone?" "No"), those comments will appear in a single conversation that flows alongside the page, in the margins. If you've ever used track changes to collaborate on a document, you know that previously such an inane exchange would mean seeing a separate comment bubble for each person's response, even if they were all addressing the same issue.


And control freaks, rejoice: you can now lock tracking, which means someone needs to enter a password to make Word stop tracking changes. The point being, unless that person knows the password, he or she can't make any changes without you knowing.


Live Layout and adding online video



It's not like you couldn't previously add online video to an Office document, but it was a pain -- hardly a beginner-level move. Now, Word allows you to insert clips directly from YouTube, Bing Video or any other site, so long as you have the HTML embed code handy. Just click the Insert tab in the Ribbon, then click – you guessed it – "Online Video." Again,  For the purposes of this walkthrough, though, we'll pretend we're searching for something on YouTube.


When you search, the results appear in a small pop-up that obscures the screen (not a browser pop-up, but a dialog box within Word). All of the search results appear as small thumbnails, and if you hover over them, you can see the title of the video (how else are you supposed to know if you've got the auto-tune remix?). Helpfully, you can also see how long a video is, so if you were looking for a music video, say, you might have an easier time weeding out the 50-second ones that obviously aren't complete. You can also preview the video first so that you don't go through the hassle of embedding it only to realize it's not what you wanted.


Once you insert the video, it's easy to resize it by dragging the corners or sides. There are also little pop-up tabs next to the frame, which you can click to select a layout option (e.g., in line with the text) or do things like cut or copy it. In theory, you can also watch a video from inside Word, without having to open up the browser. It doesn't bode well, though, that the first video we inserted had its permissions set in such a way that we had to visit YouTube if we were going to watch. Unfortunately, there's no way of clarifying that before you insert a video.


Also, in a new feature called Live Layout, the text will automatically wrap itself around a video, chart or anything else you insert into the text. And that happens in real time, even as you drag the object around. This is what we mean when we talk about Office's solid performance: as impressive as these new features are, they feel remarkably lightweight and nimble.


Editing PDFs



For a while now, Word has allowed users to save finished docs as PDF files. But until now, doing the opposite -- editing a PDF -- has required additional software, much of it not free. Here, though, when you open a PDF you can edit it as you would a Word document, and then you can either save it as such, or save it as another PDF file. We had no problem taking a PDF email attachment, typing in additional material, saving it as a PDF and then viewing it in Windows Reader. Okay, depending on who you are this might not be the most exciting new features in Office 2013, but it is certainly one of the most useful.


Reading mode






Now here's a feature Microsoft might not have bothered to include if it didn't imagine people using Office on tablets. The company's added a new reading mode -- a full-screen, read-only view that mimics the experience of reading an e-book on a tablet. To enter it, just go to the View tab in the Ribbon and find "Read Mode" all the way on the left. (Psst: This works in PowerPoint, too.)


Once you're in, the document takes up the whole screen, save for the Windows taskbar at the bottom. Like an e-book -- but very much unlike a Word document -- the pages scroll from side to side by default, instead of top-to-bottom. (If you like, you can switch to a so-called page view with vertical scrolling.) All told, it's very intuitive to find your way around: there are onscreen left and right arrows, which you can click, but you can also just swipe the screen to advance to the next page. You can also adjust the color of the text: it's black-on-white by default, but you can also choose white-on-black or a sepia theme.


Lastly, when you're in reading mode, there's a separate feature called Object Zoom, which allows you to expand a photo or table within the text by double clicking or tapping it. Like any good e-reader app, you can also search for specific words in the text, or perform a search (in this case, with Bing).


Onscreen keyboard
Sticking with this tablet theme for a moment, Microsoft built in the same well-spaced touchscreen keyboard you'll find in Windows 8. We especially appreciate that the apostrophe is to the right of the "L" key, as it is on a physical keyboard. There's also a visible Ctrl key so that you can press Ctrl + S to save your work. Lastly, we had a good experience with the predictive spelling, which presents suggestions in the form of small, unobtrusive pop-ups.


Excel


Flash Fill






We can remember a time when Sparklines, those charts-within-cells, were the marquee new feature for Excel. This year, though, you'll notice that many of the major new additions don't necessarily aim to jazz up spreadsheets so much as take the tedium out of the number-crunching. Exhibit A: Flash Fill. It's a feature that recognizes your data patterns to the point where it should be able to predict what belongs in the remaining blank cells and fill them in for you. For example, if you were to make a spreadsheet detailing on what days different departments were using the main conference room, Excel would eventually pick up on the fact that every marketing executive has a meeting there Tuesday, while the publicity people are due there on Thursday.


In theory, you just have to enter some of that data and then go to the Data tab, where you press the Flash Fill button to make it fill in the rest. For instance, in a demo spreadsheet provided by Microsoft, one column shows a list of company email addresses, each of which follow the format "firstname.lastname." After typing two first names in the blank "First name" column, Excel filled in the rest. Ditto when we added a column for last names.


In our own testing, we enjoyed similar success, but discovered that Flash Fill doesn't make sense of all data -- for example, it doesn't recognize "yes" and "no" as values. So, there might well be times when Excel won't be able to survey your data set and pick up on the patterns within.

Suggestions for visuals


Fortunately, Excel includes some new features that prove to be a little more intelligent than Flash Fill. These include recommendations for so-called PivotTables as well as charts. Using the data we just talked about (employees, their departments and their health insurance status) the Recommended PivotTable feature (located under the Insert tab) came up with a few logical options: employee count by department, and a count of insured versus uninsured workers. Sounds right to us. Likewise, the Recommended Charts feature (also in the Insert section) offered up the same ideas, only represented in pretty bar graph form.


Timeline Slicer



A new addition to Office's collection of so-called Slicers, Timeline allows you to filter data by certain time periods (think: sales data for 2011).


Quick Analysis






Though the name would suggest otherwise, this feature isn't so much a shortcut for making sense of your data as it is a way to preview different visuals. As you can see in that screenshot above, once you click on the corresponding Quick Analysis icon you'll see various formatting options, and as you hover over them you'll see the document change accordingly, giving you a glimpse of what you'll see if you end up selecting that option.


PowerPoint




Presenter View



So no fancy new charts in Excel, but lots of ways to make sifting through your data a little more efficient. It's a similar story with PowerPoint: even more than animated transitions, Microsoft is focusing on behind-the-scenes features designed to take some of the anxiety out of presentations. For starters, when you plug in a projector, Windows will automatically extend your desktop onto that larger screen so that you don't have to fiddle with the setup in front of your audience.


Once you're plugged in and ready to start your talk, you'll have the option of using a new presenter view, visible only on the screen you're using (press Alt + F5 to bring it up). Not unlike the presenter screen in Apple's Keynote software, this shows you the time elapsed, as well as any notes you may have written yourself. You can also enlarge text, teleprompter-style and pinch the slider to see the full slide deck -- very similar to how you can pinch to get a bird's eye view of your Windows 8 Start screen. The idea, says Microsoft, is to be able to nimbly skip forward a few slides if someone in the audience asks a question about some topic you haven't gotten to yet. If you do rearrange the slide, it won't be visible to the audience on the big screen. None of the behind-the-scenes stuff will be.






As ever, you can also scribble, or "ink," on slides using either a pen or your finger. (You'll have to tap an icon first to enable this.) You'll see this as an option under the Review tab when you're marking up slides, but you can also do it during your presentation, from the Presenter View screen.


Miscellaneous
The rest of the new PowerPoint features are a motley bunch. You can merge shapes to create custom ones. In addition to using an eyedropper to select colors, you can also match a color to an accompanying photo. Music playback has also been improved so that you can now play a track in the background across multiple slides or the whole presentation. Additionally, Microsoft has expanded its list of supported media file types to include .MP4 files, meaning you can export to .MP4 as well as play such files natively without having to install QuickTime.


Outlook

Look and feel
In its current incarnation, Outlook still looks like, well, Outlook, but you'll notice that many of the options aren't immediately visible. Much like there's no fixed Start button in Windows 8, the flags in Outlook only appear if you hover next to a message with your mouse. Also new with this version: a weather bar stretching across the top of your calendar. You can manually change the location, but by default, Office shows only one set of weather forecasts at a time. Another, more miscellaneous change: if you've begun to respond to an email, but saved it as a draft, the word "Draft" will appear in red in your inbox, next to the message (yes, just like Gmail).


Peeks






With this version, the company is also introducing fly-over menus called Peeks, which show things like calendar appointments, to-do items and information about your contacts. To find these, look for the icons stacked on top of each other in the lower left corner of the screen. Mouse over the calendar icon, for instance, and you'll see a live, pop-up window that allows you to glance at your agenda without having to toggle between tabs to check your schedule. If you're wide open, you'll see a message saying you have no appointments; if you are booked, it'll tell you when.

Social connectors

Continuing this theme of showing as much information in one place as possible (without you having to click to a different screen): if you're reading an email from someone, you can click an arrow at the bottom of the screen to pull up the People Pane. While this pane isn't new (you could previously see your meetings with that person and also your email history), you can now glance at that person's social networking goings-on. For now, Outlook natively integrates with Facebook and LinkedIn, but not Twitter, for whatever reason. (There is, however, an API that makes this possible.)


As we quickly learned, this feature is worthwhile mainly if you're on Facebook and also friends with the people you're conversing with. Obviously, you won't see updates from a business associate you aren't connected to on Facebook. At the same time, the LinkedIn integration is fairly useless unless someone is super active on that site; you'll only see recent activity, and even then, the tidbits tend to be uninteresting. After all, do you really need to know if someone just added someone else to their network? Really, Twitter integration would make this new feature so much more valuable: people are nosy enough to care about other people's tweets and fortunately, most of us don't bother to lock our accounts.


SharePoint integration
In news that will matter most to the IT guys reading this, Microsoft has improved the integration between Outlook and SharePoint so that SharePoint groups now have their own mailboxes. From here, you see documents stored on SharePoint without leaving Outlook. (To edit them, of course, you'll need to open the corresponding Office app.) We also appreciate that the reverse is also possible: you can drag and drop attachments into the docs folder for SharePoint and they'll upload to your team's site.


OneNote


The biggest news here is that OneNote, that receptacle for random thoughts and musings, will be available as a standalone, Metro-styled Windows 8 app. Though we caught a glimpse of it in an advance meeting with Microsoft, it wasn't available for testing during our preview period, so our impressions are more limited here. Rounding out the list, OneNote is also getting a full-screen view, auto-save, improved table tools, enhanced scribbling (nay, inking) functionality, integration with Outlook calendars, more efficient search and the ability to record audio alongside notes.


Business apps


Since most of our readers aren't suit-wearing business travelers so much as exceptionally well-informed consumers, we're not going to delve into the new enterprise-grade features in nearly as much detail as Word, Outlook and other core apps. If corporate software rings your bell, though, we've got a quick rundown below of what's new:


Lync: Microsoft's messaging and video chatting client can now show up to five video streams simultaneously (previously, it could only handle multiple voices at once). By default, the active speaker will be promoted to the top. If more than five people are speaking, you can set Lync to prioritize whose video stream is being shown (those not featured will have photo thumbnails instead of a video stream). If you like, of course, you can also cherry pick whose video you're seeing.
Publisher: With Publisher, you can now import all your pictures to a single canvas, making it easy to experiment with possible images. Microsoft has also added text, shape and picture effects; a Mailings tab in the Ribbon; and the ability to use your own photos as page backgrounds. As with other apps we've talked about, you can share a URL with people where they can view your work in the browser. The new feature for easily adding photos from online sources applies here, too.
Visio: Office's standalone diagram creator gets updated shapes, as well as easier workflows for creating organizational charts and tweaking diagrams. Microsoft has also revised the app so that if you change shapes, you won't affect the entire diagram layout you've been working on.
Versions and subscription plans


So far, Microsoft hasn't revealed any pricing information for Office 2013, though it has outlined the different forms Office will take. There will, of course, be the web-based service Office 365 along with the desktop Office 2013 suite. Additionally, Office will be available on ARM-based tablets running Windows RT -- albeit, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote only. Finally, enterprises can purchase a server-specific version capable of hosting Exchange, SharePoint, Project and Lync. In cases such as those, businesses can choose cloud hosting, local servers or a combination of the two.


Oh, and if you're wondering about Office for Mac, that will be available too, but Microsoft isn't ready to give the public a preview just yet.


All told, here are the specific products Microsoft is previewing right now:


Office 365 Home Premium: Can be installed on up to five devices; users get an extra 20GB of SkyDrive storage; Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher are included.
Office 365 Small Business Preview: Can be issued to up to 10 users, with five installations each; adds "professional mail, shared documents and HD videoconferencing."
Office 365 ProPlus Preview: Can be issued to up to 25 users, with five installations each; includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath and Lync.
Office 365 Enterprise Preview: In addition to the above applications, this version includes SharePoint online and Lync Online.


Wrap-up

Sometimes it's the little things, like saving documents to SkyDrive, that charm us most. Even more than any actual feature in Office 2013, what left us most enchanted during our testing period was the moment we powered down our Series 7 tablet, turned it back on, launched Word and found the cursor exactly where we left it. The best thing about Office is not what it does better than Office 2010, but how much more nimble it is in following you from device to device, from shut-down to start-up again. Beyond that, no one single feature of Office 2013 is dazzling, per se, but it doesn't matter: everything here, from YouTube embeds to the chart generator in Excel, works as promised and is intuitive to use. At the same time, the interface doesn't mark a radical departure from previous versions, so even casual users with no use for PivotTables should be able to find their way around.


The one caveat we feel compelled to offer is that although Office 2013 has been updated to keep pace with Windows 8, this is not some sort of magic bullet that will suddenly make Office a pleasure to use on tablet devices: while reading mode is fantastic and touch mode is a step in the right direction, we still wouldn't want to work with spreadsheets without the help of a mouse. That disclaimer aside, we've found very few faults with Office 2013 -- it's fast, polished and painless to use.


Office Preview download link, Microsoft (press release)