Interactive Touch Guide for Office

If you need help or ideas on figuring out the best way to maximize your use of touch devices (like the Surface Pro) with Office 2013, check out Microsoft’s Touch Guide for the new Office. There are some feature tips there that you might not know exist in Office – check it out:

Ribbon & Space Management with OneNote 2013

Did you know that when you rotate your tablet to the Portrait orientation, OneNote 2013 automatically flips to full page mode, meaning it hides all the navigation and chrome, thus maximizing your writing space?

This is a very cool feature for us Surface Pro users who want to use our pen to write notes in the traditional way we’d do it if we had a paper notebook in our hand. But below is a slight tweak I use to help me get access to frequently-used features, while still maximizing space.

Change Ink Color easily with pen and touch on Surface Pro

Surface Pro and SharePoint 2013–Finger-clicking the Ellipses button

I don’t have an elegant solution here – it’s simply a statement: trying to finger-click the ellipses (3-dot) button on a SharePoint site using a Windows tablet (like my Surface Pro) can be tricky. Check out my video to see what I mean:

Insert Camera Image using OneNote

Every time I’ve ever tried to insert a scanned image or webcam image into OneNote (desktop version), I was met with an error about drivers, and being unable to access the scanner/camera.

Thankfully, OneNote MX (Win8 Metro version) seems to have addressed this issue. The below video shows the smooth integration of the webcam for inserting pictures. I’ve seen this work both with my Surface Pro, as well as a traditional laptop using OneNote MX. It’s certainly not a solution to the desktop-version problem, but it’s a pretty good alternative:

You don’t have to be a Photoshop user to be excited about the new pen drivers!

Surface Pro owners have been giddy over the fact that Wacom finally created drivers that allow for pressure sensitivity in Photoshop – the buzz is all over Twitter. This is indeed very kool for those looking to use the Surface Pro for high-end graphic design, but it’s also exciting for us mere mortals as well!

Looking at the new Pen Tablet Properties screen shows that we get some additional features beyond just Photoshop goodness:

 

Happy Mother’s Day from Surface Pro Bro