Agave Apps for Office 2013 Get Detailed

Microsoft’s Office 2013 productivity suite is expected to arrive on shelves with support for a series of Office web extensions called Agaves, and some info on these is now available.

Through Agaves, developers will be able to come up with new features for the suite, providing web pages with the possibility to interact with documents and augment content.

Apparently, three different types of such applications will be available for the upcoming Office 2013, all of which got detailed in a recent article on LiveSide.

Through a Task Pane app for Office, for example, users will be able to access additional functionality for Excel and Word documents, courtesy of a task pane adjacent to the document.

Apparently, these won’t be available for the web counterparts of Excel and Word, and would include, for example, dictionary and reference apps like Britannica, or Merriam-Webster, so that users could search for information easier than before.

A Bing News Search app such as the one in the first screenshot to the left could be easily attached to Word 2013, enabling users to find content on the web and insert it into their documents.

A Content app for Excel should arrive along with office 2013, providing additional content and functionality to the body of a document.

Excel Web App might also arrive as part of this new Agave approach, offering users the possibility to plot data on a map, as can be seen in the second screenshot attached to this article.

Through Mail app for Office, content and functionality adjacent to an Outlook item can be added, based on a series of activation rules.

Outlook 2013 or Outlook Web App connected to Exchange 2013 should receive it, offering abilities such as the option to view a contact’s profiles on social networks straight from Outlook. Have a look at it in the last screenshot to the left.

Microsoft is expected to launch an Office Store for developers interested in coming up with such apps for Office 2013, so that they would benefit from wide reach and the possibility to monetize on them.

Some of the latest rumors around the web suggested that Microsoft might be set to announce the upcoming availability of Office 2013 as soon as today, and some more info on these Agave should arrive at that time.