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Office 2013 reading features in Word detailed

With the new Office 2013 preview version now available for Windows users to check out, many of the preview users have been writing documents on the new version of Microsoft Word. However, Microsoft said it wanted to improve not just the writing features of Word but also how people read documents on the application.

In a new post on the Office Next blog, Microsoft goes into some details about how they have tried to make documents look and read better in the new Word. The blog states:

When you open a document in Read Mode, you’ll immediately notice that we’ve minimized the application UI as much as possible. When you read, the UI can be a distraction. Our goal was to eliminate distractions so the content had your full attention.

The new Word also supports Office 2013's full screen mode, which gets rid of all of the user interface elements. For touch screen-based hardware, the new Word has been optimized so that users can read each page of a document with a flick of a finger.

The Read Mode in the new Word also has sliders so that users can adjust the size of the font or the width of the columns in the document. It can also re-size the Windows itself. The blog states:

Whatever size you make the window, or if you rotate your tablet between landscape and portrait modes, the screen will always be divided into equally sized columns that stay as close as possible to the column width you prefer.

The new version of Word also includes some handy reference tools when you read a document, such as being able to look up a word in a dictionary, a quick translation in case the document is not in your native language and a way to search for topics in a document via Bing.

Source: Office Next blog | Image via Microsoft

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