Wed in London

Good morning Londoners! I hope you all had a great weekend. We have a fantastic competition lined up for you today worth just under £200. In conjunction with Microsoft we are giving away an “All You Need To Plan Your Wedding Online” Pack which includes:

• One year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium (value: £79.99)
• Microsoft Wedge Touch Mouse (value: £69.99)
• Sculpt Mobile Keyboard (value: £49.99)

The latest research shows that men are becoming increasingly more involved in wedding planning and technology is playing a leading role. Microsoft Office 365 polled UK wedding planners to find out who wears the trousers when it comes to planning a modern wedding. 72% of those surveyed said that they have seen a sharp increase in grooms getting more involved over the past couple of years. Nine out of ten wedding planners have also said that they have seen a huge increase in clients using technology to plan their weddings. Online mood boards are the most popular, followed by sharing photos online, creating spreadsheeets of venues and suppliers and using video calling for virtual meetings.

Celebrity wedding planner Mark Niemierko agrees that technology is the key to getting men involved: “We’re seeing people move away from the formal speeches-and-cake-cutting style weddings. My clients are seeing their big day as an opportunity to throw a great party for their family and friends, and this has seen men become keener to be involved.”

Mark tells us exactly how technology can help to plan your wedding: “Technology is an essential part of planning a wedding these days; from managing the budget and timelines through to creating mood boards for inspiration and much more. I’ve used Microsoft Office for years and literally could not do what I do without it”.

MY THOUGHTS ON OFFICE 365*

I have had a play around with Microsoft Office 365 myself and have to agree that it is a fantastic tool to help you in planning your wedding.

• First of all, it is a “cloud subscription”, meaning that it works on all different types of devices – including PCs, laptops, Macs, mobiles and Windows tablets. This also allows you to access/create/edit/amend and share your wedding budgets, checklists and notes on the go, meaning you don’t have to lug around a heavy wedding folder anymore.

• More specifically, the OneNote tool allows you to create a section tab for each category of your wedding – dress, venue, catering, flowers, photography, etc. From this you can then create to-do lists, all of which are stored in one easy place (I lost track of the amount of times I misplaced my handwritten to-do list when planning our wedding, so this tool would really have come in handy!)

• You can collect and collate images in a Digital Scrapbook, with automatic links back to the webpages from where the image was taken.

• Excel was one of the best tools I used for my own wedding planning. From the off I used spreadsheets to compare venues based on location, hire cost, catering cost and licence times. Once we had chosen the venue I then continued to use Excel to manage our budget and to draft our guest list.

• Office 365 even has a seating plan template. I’ve watched friends try to organise table plans the old fashioned way with scrapes of paper and it wasn’t fun. The Office 365 seating chart template will take half the stress of table planning away, trust me!

ENTER NOW

To be in with a chance to win a years subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium, together with the wedge touch mouse and keyboard, simply complete the form below and tell us your favourite online or technology-related wedding tool.

Entries close at midnight on Wednesday 29th May 2013.

Terms & Conditions:

- The winner will be chosen at random and will be contacted within 24 hours of entries closing.

- The winner must provide a UK postal address to which the prizes can be sent. Microsoft will cover the shipping costs within the UK only.

- If the winner does not provide an address within 10 days of being contacted they will forfeit their right to the prize and another winner will be drawn.

- There is no cash alternative and the prizes are not refundable nor exchangeable.

*Disclosure – As part of this competition I have been given a copy of Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium to keep myself.