Works with: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher
While Office applications have always made it easy to insert graphics and other assets into documents, Office 2013 is the first version to integrate with online sources of photos and videos. This is a time saver, of course, but it also allows you to find the items you need in the places you’d naturally look.
Most of the core Office 2013 applications can now insert photos and other pictures directly from online services such as Office.com, Bing Image Search, Flickr, and SkyDrive, in addition to the more traditional insertion of pictures stored locally on your hard drive. To do so, access the new Online Pictures item in the Insert tab of the application’s ribbon. You’ll be presented with a floating window like the following:
Each of these sources will display results inline in the insertion interface. For example, Bing Image Search provides thumbnails of search results right in this same window.
Some of the core applications—like Word and PowerPoint—can also insert online video using a similar interface. In Word, there is a dedicated Online Video item in the Insert tab of the ribbon. But in PowerPoint, you must navigate to Insert, Video, Online Video, where the latter is an item in a drop-down menu. Either way, the experience is very similar to that of online pictures, with a floating window providing access to online video sources such as Bing Video Search, SkyDrive, YouTube, or video embed code.
Not surprisingly, each online video source displays results as per pictures, inline in the same UI.
Tip: If you’re online, you can watch online videos in documents too.
