Apps for Microsoft Word

Posted by Craig Mill on the 26th May, 2015

If you have the latest online version of Office 365 (available through Glow) or if you have downloaded the desktop version, Office 2013 (also through Glow in participating authorities) there’s a new feature, ‘Office Store’ that could offer some handy features to support learning, directly from within Word. Combined with ‘My Apps’ you can extend and enhance the tools that are currently available in Word. 

Adding Apps to Word

The Office Store and My Apps is located in Word’s Ribbon; Insert > Store > My Apps. You may need to check that you have access to the Office Web Store (by clicking Store) first of all. You should also be signed in to your Microsoft/Glow account before you can download and install apps from the Office Store.

However, once you are set up and ready to go, there are hundreds of apps to choose from, including apps to support literacy, numeracy, productivity, referencing, organisation, planning and study skills etc. The Maps for Office and Typing Tutor apps are personal favourites. The illustration below is one example – Texthelp Study Skills which is essentially a colour/text extraction tool. The pupil simply highlights the bits of text they need, then presses the Ctrl + A keys to select the text, and finally clicks ‘Collect Highlights’.

Texthelp Study Skills will open in a new window with the extracted text which can then be pasted into another document.

This example would work particularly well if a pupil has scanned a paper document (using Optical Character Recognition OCR) and wants to extract the main points or key areas of a document, article or book etc. Or alternatively, I’ve used an existing Word document ‘Across the Barricades’ that I downloaded from the Books for All database. 

You can have as many apps open at the same time but the space of your working document will decrease in size as the side window/pane expands with apps. If you do need more than one app open at a time you can click and drag the apps into the document and arrange them as you want them.

Managing Apps in Word

You can browse or manage your apps from within Word: 'My Apps', 'See All' and 'Manage my Apps'.

But if you would prefer just to browse through the range of Office Apps you don’t need to be in Word to do so. The following link will take you to the Word App Store:http://bit.ly/wordapps You can also download and install apps for PowerPoint, Excel etc.

 

I think that over time this is an area which will grow, with apps increasing in number and in quality.

The main benefits of using Word Apps is that you don’t need to leave or click between different programs and Windows, you can do everything from within Word.

One example is Wikipedia which searches for information in the built-in panel. 

Rephrase is another useful app, which helps to rephrase sentences by simply highlighting and choosing an alternative wording. 

If you are unsure about the content or potential benefit of any app each one has an option to find out more about the 'App details', Rate and review' or 'Remove' the app from Word. This can be accessed from the 'Manage My Apps' tool.