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Microsoft Office is the most widely used productivity software in the world, but most people just know the basics. This helpful guide gets you started with the programs in Office 2013, and provides lots of power-user tips and tricks when you're ready for more. You'll learn about Office's new templates and themes, touchscreen features, and other advances, including Excel's Quick Analysis tool.

The important stuff you need to know:

• Create professional-looking documents. Use Word to craft reports, newsletters, and brochures for the Web and desktop.
• Stay organized. Set up Outlook to track your email, contacts, appointments, and tasks.
• Work faster with Excel. Determine the best way to present your data with the new Quick Analysis tool.
• Make inspiring presentations. Build PowerPoint slideshows with video and audio clips, charts and graphs, and animations.
• Share your Access database. Design a custom database and let other people view it in their web browsers.
• Get to know the whole suite. Use other handy Office tools: Publisher, OneNote, and a full range of Office Web Apps.
• Create and share documents in the cloud. Upload and work with your Office files in Microsoft's SkyDrive.

Matthew MacDonald is a science and technology writer with well over a dozen books to his name. Web novices can tiptoe out onto the Internet with him in Creating a Website: The Missing Manual. HTML fans can learn about the cutting edge of web design in HTML5: The Missing Manual. And human beings of all description can discover just how strange they really are in the quirky handbooks Your Brain: The Missing Manual and Your Body: The Missing Manual.

Nancy Conner has a PhD in English from Brown University and has taught writing, including technical writing, to college students for more than a dozen years. She is currently a freelance author and copyeditor specializing in technical books, and has written on topics ranging from classical mythology to Google Apps to the MS Office suite.