Office

Microsoft Office now puts even more self-serve business intelligence capabilities at your fingertips, thanks to a round of significant updates announced in a Data Platform Insider blog post on Wednesday.

If your heart beats fast for finance, spreadsheets and numerical analysis – and you know who you are – it’s time to show off your chops and compete in ModelOff 2013, the Excel Financial Modeling World Championship.

Eric Ligman perked up not long ago when he heard someone pining about how they wished free online Office videos or training resources were available. As a Microsoft blogger and longtime employee at the company, Ligman has become a veritable font of information about how to get the most out of Microsoft products and services.

Season two of the Office 365 “Garage Series” videos kicked off Wednesday with a very helpful side-by-side comparison of two big Office products: Office 2013 and Office 365.

To address security concerns, developers can use a two-domain design. The domains communicate through a message-posting function, and then actions are taken by the event listeners.

To show you how easy it is, the Office team created an interactive tutorial that teaches developers and would-be developers how to get started writing code for an Office app using the JavaScript API.

The updated version of “Napa” includes improvements in the user experience, new templates, improved support for task pane apps for Office, a Mails app activation rules editor and new social features.