Stories by Yardena Arar

As promised, Microsoft has delivered the final pieces of its new Office lineup, rolling out several new global editions for businesses.

The wait is over for Office 2013 and Office 365. Starting Tuesday, the latest version of Microsoft's venerable productivity suite goes on sale to consumers and academics, both on Microsoft's Office.com site and at retail outlets. You can buy the traditional stand-alone desktop software or, for the first time, consumers and students can buy Office as a subscription service that will make multiple installations cheaper.

Although consumers and businesses are turning more often to Web-based software and mobile apps, many millions still depend on Microsoft Office to get their work done every day. The folks in Redmond want you to use Office wherever you go—on your PC, your tablet, and your Windows Phone handset. To that end, Microsoft is pushing deep integration between its desktop applications and your data, stored on Microsoft servers.

Google is so ubiquitous in our everyday digital lives that it's easy to overlook the many tools it offers that have a business slant.

Although it's based on Intel's fastest new Ivy Bridge CPU for Ultrabooks, the Dell XPS 14 at 4.7 pounds hovers perilously close in weight to the all-purpose laptop category. But Dell gives you several reasons to lug the extra ounces around, especially if you value good multimedia features.

If you're looking for an Ultrabook with the superslim good looks of a MacBook Air, enough computing oomph to handle multimedia and general business tasks, plus a good-enough battery life, take a long hard look at the Acer Aspire S5. Especially the superslim good looks part.

With the latest iteration of Office, Microsoft pledges to bring the documents and services you need to run a business to any screen you choose, from a PC to a touch-enabled Windows Surface tablet or Windows 8 Phone.

Fujitsu has produced a lot of first-rate subnotes over the years, but the Lifebook UH572 is a shaky start to its Ultrabook endeavors. While it looks good, boasts a nice webcam, and packs a roomy hard drive, this 13.3-inch portable disappoints on several fronts.

The move to Cloud computing isn't just for businesses. At CES, home network giants D-Link and Netgear are showing a range of equipment that leverage cloud services to give consumers more access to and control over home networks--and network content--from mobile devices.

The Acer Aspire One 522 (model BZ897) delivers a good, classic netbook for a very reasonable price ($330 as of March 18, 2011). Petite and slim with a handsome 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display, a 250GB hard drive, an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a multitouch touchpad, this portable does a solid job with multimedia and boasts pretty good battery life: nearly 7 hours in our tests using the provided 6-cell battery.

TaxActDeluxe has been the budget tax-software option for some time now, but can it handle business taxes? The answer is yes -- but only if you don't need a heap of guidance and you can make do with limited data-import features.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

From Jules Verne to Stanley Kubrick and beyond, writers and artists have imagined what the future would be like. Their visions range from the comically bizarre to the uncannily accurate to the wildly optimistic (where are those jet packs they promised us?!). Here's a quick collection of our favorite examples.

Even if your work is humdrum, your documents shouldn't be. The latest version of Microsoft Office makes it easier than ever to create handsome documents, thanks to some cool new tools for dressing up text, displaying images, and embedding video.

Home networking giant Netgear plans to introduce a 500 megabit-per-second line of HomePlug AV powerline products this fall. Netgear announced a slew of products, including next-generation powerline and advanced multimedia-optimized Wi-Fi products this week at CeBIT, the giant tech trade show in Hannover, Germany.