News: "Ghost Protocol", Plus 4 More Reasons to Download the New Microsoft Office 365

Yesterday, Microsoft released the customer preview of its newest version of Office, the first version optimized for both touchscreens and desktop systems. The entire suite got a much-needed facelift and a few new cool features. Here are some of the most notable changes.

Cloud

The new Office is very cloud-friendly. Store documents, collaborate with coworkers, and post to Facebook or Twitter directly from the cloud. The cloud also stores your preferences, so you don't need to set them up multiple times if you use more than one machine.

Read and Edit PDFs

No more cutting and pasting! You can now open a PDF in Word and the content will act like Word content, making it much easier to work with. This should also eliminate the need for those pesky PDF to Word converters!

Web Content

Grab, insert and edit content from the Web easily—including videos. There's even a search box (Bing, of course) integrated right into the software so you can insert images and videos from the Web without having to leave the program.

Ghost Protocol

If you do a lot of work in Excel, you'll love this feature. The program looks for patterns among columns and will predict what comes next, so you can auto-fill those tedious lists and save some time.

Attachment Reminder

We've all sent an email explicitly stating that something is attached to it...and then forgotten to attach it. Outlook now includes a feature that reminds you if you forget an aforementioned attachment (just like Gmail already does), saving you the trouble (and embarrassment) of having to resend it.

Try Out the New Office Now

This is a far from a comprehensive list of some of the changes you'll see in Office 365. To see what else is new and try it out for yourself, download the free trial from Microsoft here.