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New Microsoft Office taps into the cloud

Like Windows 8, the new version of Office will let you sign in with an online account, providing you with the same settings across different devices.

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Lance Whitney
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Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.

Microsoft's new version of Office will take heavy advantage of the cloud.

Demoing the upcoming new suite at a press conference today, Kirk Koenigsbauer, a corporate vice president for Office, explained how Office apps will sync key settings by using SkyDrive as a central repository.

After you sign in, you'll see the same settings, templates, dictionaries, and recent documents across all your Windows devices: PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

Using Word as an example, Koenigsbauer showed how users can insert pictures through the traditional Office.com clipart, through image searches via Bing, by opening something from SkyDrive, or by grabbing something from Flickr. Even further, Office can incorporate live multimedia into its documents, with a user embedding a live YouTube video, for example.

Through the SkyDrive integration, people receive a message asking if they want to work on the same document they were using on a different device. And by storing documents directly on SkyDrive, users can share them with colleagues and friends.

Watch our First Look at the new Microsoft Office:

First Look
Watch this: Get in touch with The New Microsoft Office