Get More Out of Office 2013 With Free Bing Office Apps

Microsoft’s Bing is more than just an online search engine. It’s deeply integrated into Windows 8.1 and several of its services. If you want to have the same type of Bing search features in Office 2013 too, you can! Here’s a look at a few free Bing apps that will enhance Office 2013 and make you more productive. And the best part is, they’re all free.

Note: You can also install these is you have the Office 365 subscription, as well as Office 2013 Home and Student Edition on Surface’s running RT.

How to Add Bing Office Apps to Office 2013

Installing the apps is simple. From the page where the Bing app is located, click the Add button.

After that, open your Office application you want to use the app in, and you’ll find it under the Insert tab the Apps for Office.

If you don’t see an app that you recently downloaded, got to See All and then hit Refresh.

Bing News Search

If you’re writing a report for school, or blogging from Word 2013, you might want an easy way to search for news related to your subject in the task pane. Bing News Search allows you to do just that. It allows you to do a quick search while inside Word and insert a current news story or video related to the topic in your document.

Here’s an example of an article I added. It has a brief summary, and a link to the full article.

Bing Dictionary

Bing Dictionary is probably best suited for Word but also works in Excel 2013. Once added, launch it the same way you do the other apps, and when you highlight a word or phrase you’ll get a definition in the right pane. It also gives you a thesaurus and get pronunciations of words.

Bing Image Search

Bing Image Search is a great way to find a perfect picture to get your point across in a word document. Plus, all of the results are licensed under Creative Commons so are generally fine to use in most situations – especially in a corporate environment. Since you do get less results for images under Creative Commons, you need to be “creative” with your search terms to find that perfect image.

It’s also worth noting that you can have more than one Bing app run at the same time in any document for spreadsheet. For instance, here I have Bing Dictionary and Bing News running side-by-side.

These are just a few helpful plugins to get started with. Microsoft has a full page full of Bing plugins for Office 2013 for you to check out.

If you have any suggestions on other Office 2013 apps that help you throughout your workday, please leave a comment and tell us about it.