Microsoft Office 2013: Ten apps from the Store

The Britannica Researcher app displays more than 80,000 articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a pane alongside documents in Word 2013.

Articles can be searched by highlighting text and images, citations and references can be inserted into documents.

Image: Microsoft

The Hertz app allows users to rent cars from within Outlook.

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The Bing Maps for Office app allows users to plot location data from an Excel spreadsheet on a Bing map embedded in the page.

The map can be manipulated via the embedded controls, allowing users to pan, zoom and change the map view.

Locations icons can be customised and made to reflect data - for instance, an icon can be a pie chart of data linked to that location.

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The Twitter PowerApp allows users to display Twitter feeds from inside Outlook.

Users can follow, tweet and direct message to other Twitter users, as well as access their recent Tweet-feed and profile content.

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Sage Intelligence Go! allows users of on-premise or cloud-based Sage Accounting and ERP systems to design reports within Excel 2013 or 365.

The app inserts data from these Sage databases into Excel, providing businesses with access to financial data to create reports and eliminate the need to set up database connections and queries.

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harmo.ie for SharePoint encourages users to share documents via Microsoft SharePoint rather than emailing them.

When emailing documents, harmon.ie prompts the user to upload the document to SharePoint and send a link instead.

Benefits include reducing storage use because the document is not duplicated on an email server and increased security as users can only open SharePoint documents they are authorised to view.

Future versions of the app will include the ability to save emails to SharePoint.

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One for Olympics lovers, the Medal Tracker app lets users track and analyse results from the London 2012 Games using Excel.

Features include tracking medal counts by team and comparing winners across teams, athletes and events.

Data collected by the app can also be embedded into a spreadsheet and displayed in charts and tables.

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The Calendar Picker is an calendar that can be used to enter dates into Excel spreadsheets.

The app is designed to be useful when working with timesheets, schedules, project plans, logs and other uses where users need to frequently refer to a calendar.

Dates can be entered in a cell by selecting it on the calendar. Dates can also be highlighted on the calendar by selecting them in the spreadsheet.

The calendar size, date system and appearance is customisable.

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The Groupon PowerApp provides information in Outlook about local Groupon deals.

Users can view a countdown timer showing how much time is left to purchase, an interactive Bing map displaying the location of the offer and how many people have bought the deal.

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