Bing Apps Now Available in Microsoft’s Office Store

Microsoft's Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium products are now available for purchase worldwide, just as announced a few days ago, and it seems that users can already take advantage of some new features for them.

To be more precise, Microsoft has made available for download Bing Apps for Office, which are nothing else than free Bing-powered apps for the new Office 365 Home Premium.

The Redmond-based software giant already had Bing apps available for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox, and it has decided to expand their availability, it seems.

“Our goal is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of knowledge Bing has assembled for search,” a recent post from the Bing Team reads.

“You can see this today with features like: voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using your phone’s camera with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search with Bing on Windows 8.”

The new Bing Apps for Office bring along new ways in which users can remain productive, all without having to leave the application.

There are five Bing Apps for Office available for download through the Office Store now, namely Bing Finance for Excel, Bing Maps for Excel, Bing Image Search for Word, Bing News Search for Word and Bing Dictionary for Excel and Word.

With Bing Maps for Office, a data visualization tool for Excel, users can plot location data on a Bing Map, being able to use location names and map controls to easily zoom in and out of the map.

Bing Finance for Office, currently available in a beta flavor, enables people to build a finance portfolio table in Excel.

The Bing News Search for Office offers access to searching news and related videos straight from a Word document, while also allowing for Bing search results to be included in the document.

The Bing Dictionary (English) for Office was designed to discover high-quality language knowledge, so as to provide users with the latest definitions and spelling available.

As for the Bing Image Search for Office, it was meant at enabling customers to easily search for images on the web, all without leaving the Word document they were working on in the first place.

Those who would like to try these Bing Apps should head over to the aforementioned Office Store for that. Of course, they will also have to purchase Office 365 Home Premium before that.