An Android Tablet User's First Day with Windows 8 & Office 2013

These are some of the things I learned on my first day of upgrading to Windows 8 with MS Office 2013. 


The Good:

1.  Windows 8 on my 2 year old Core 2 Solo Acer Aspire 3810T laptop just makes me smile from ear to ear.:)   Understand that I am coming from Vista and have skipped Windows 7.  If you've read some of my posts in this blog then you are warned that I am mainly interested in computing for mobile productivity, so I don't have great expectations on speed and gaming.

2.  I find this Windows 8 split screen very, very useful.  It makes me almost forget about extended monitors.

Windows 8 split screen video from TechLeverage.

3.  All my devices worked without any need to download or install drivers.

4.    OneNote 2013 is a beauty and it's ability to dock on the right side of one's desktop makes meeting or class note-taking such a pleasurable experience.  If you have been using Office for quite some time now but haven't used OneNote yet then I suggest you try it.  It's one of my most used PC applications.  In fact, had they made OneNote sync and work well on mobile devices (both Android and iOS) then I wouldn't even have resorted to apps like Evernote and Springpad for notes and Wunderlist for shared tasks/things-to-do lists.




The Bad:

1.  Took me some time to figure out eliminating errors in importing my old outlook .pst files. 

2.  Here's the major one:   Google Calendar Sync will no longer work on new installations.  This leaves me with a great dilemma.  How can I now manage and sync my work email (running on Outlook 2013) with my Google calendar (synced on my Android tab) without needing to upgrade to paid Google Apps?  Here's more info on "Google Sync End of Life" from Google support and documentation site.



Well, this is what I found out on my first day of upgrading to Windows 8 and Office 2013.   I may add some other lessons learned if I find anything worth writing in the coming days.  But right now, except for Google calendar sync problem, this Windows 8/Office2013 combo is so worth the upgrade.

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