Office 2013 is touchscreen ready, cloud friendly, and adds bold new twists to the Microsoft Office franchise. On
Monday Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer outlined what he said was the "biggest most ambitious Office" update to date.
For the desktop Office 2013 delivers a host of smart updates to
Word, Outlook, and Excel. But where Office 2013 shines is embracing the
mobile world and the cloud with deep integration with Microsoft’s cloud
service SkyDrive and collaboration - integrating its recent acquisitions
Skype and
Yammer.
Windows 8, and the upcoming release of Microsoft Surface tablets and
Windows Phone 8 smartphones, also play a huge roles in coloring Office
2013 with new features.
Ahead of Microsoft's big news Monday Microsoft provided PCWorld
with two Windows 8 tablets (no, not the Surface) and access to the
customer preview versions of both Office 2013 and the cloud-based Office
365.
Here is a look at how the software suite runs on laptop, desktop touchscreen, and tablet platforms.
In this story, PCWorld Senior Editor Michael Brown first gives his
impressions of working with Office 2013 and 365 on a laptop and a
desktop PC. Contributing editor Tony Bradley then writes about his tests
of the new products on a tablet PC.
Office 2013, Office 365 on a Laptop and a Desktop PC
I spent most of my time with Word and Excel on a laptop and on a
desktop all-in-one equipped with a touchscreen. As expected, Microsoft
is tying Office 2013 and Office 365 tightly to its SkyDrive
cloud-storage service.
You're free to use other services, but I suspect that this
integration will lure plenty of Office users away from their paid
accounts on Google, Dropbox, and SugarSync. If you buy a version of
Microsoft's new software and sign up for a Microsoft Live account,
you'll get 20GB of free storage in SkyDrive.
The Ofiice 365 Preview settings screen.
Both Office 2013 and Office 365 offer largely the same user
experience, but Microsoft is clearly steering its customers toward the
cloud-based version. The company is also marketing Office 365 to consumers for the first time, rather than strictly to businesses.
Purchase the traditional boxed copy of the software, and you get a
license to install the software on one device. You can also use Office
365 on
any computer or tablet, but that won't be very useful if
you find yourself somewhere without your usual computer and without
Internet access.
Buy a subscription to
Office 365,
and you get licenses to download and install Office 2013 on up to five
devices (right now, the list of compatible devices is limited to PCs and
tablets running Windows 7 or Windows 8, though Microsoft says Office
2013 for Mac will be available by the time the final software is
released).
And, as with the boxed copy, you can stream Office 2013 to any PC
or tablet running Windows 7 or Windows 8. Microsoft has not yet
announced pricing for either product.
The New User Interface
The Office 2013 user interface isn't markedly different from the one in Office 2010: The
ribbon remains
front and center, though the text and the icons inside it are a bit
larger and are spaced farther apart. These changes take better advantage
of large monitors and touchscreen displays. Nevertheless, the ribbon
isn't too big for an average laptop display, even with the addition of
two new tabs: Design and Developer (actually, the Developer tab is
present in Office 2010, but it's hidden by default).
If you're familiar with the ribbon user interface from Office 2007 and Office 2010, you’ll feel right at home with Word 2013.
Though
I've used a number of all-in-one computers with touchscreens over the
past few years, I don't use the touch interface very often. Perhaps I'm
just a creature of habit, but it doesn't feel natural to take my fingers
off the mouse to stab them at icons on the screen (or maybe my fingers
are just too fat to be accurate). In any event, though I tried hard to
use the ribbon with my finger, I kept returning to the mouse. The UI
delivers more benefits on tablet platforms, but it doesn't feel any less
natural when used with a mouse.
New and Cool Word Features
Microsoft has made a number of cool, interesting, and very useful improvements to Word 2013.
The Embed PDF feature in Word.On
the usefulness front, you can now import a PDF directly into Word, edit
it as a Word doc, and then save it as either a Word doc or a PDF. Not
only do imported files retain all of the original documents'
formatting--including headers, columns, and footnotes--but elements such
as tables and graphics can be edited in Word as such.
Import a PDF file containing a table, for example, and you can edit
the table just as though you had created it in Word from scratch. You
can also embed a PDF file in a Word doc.
Microsoft expects that people will want to save all of their files to the cloud. Your SkyDrive account is listed first, then Another cool
feature is
the ability to connect to online resources and bring them inside your
documents. For example, you can use Bing to search the Web for videos,
without leaving Word, and then embed the HTML code for that video in
your document.
Link your SkyDrive account to your Flickr account, and you can jump
to your online photo collection and embed photos directly in the
document--again, without ever leaving Word.
Embedding a screenshot from an app running on your PC is even easier: Click
Insert > Screenshot,
and a window with thumbnails of every window open on your desktop will
become visible. Click the image you want, and it will appear wherever
your cursor is.
When you embed an image or a video in a document, you can grab that
element and move it around the document and watch as your text
automatically reflows around it in real time.
Word Collaboration Features
When you're collaborating with other people on a document, being able
to track the changes that each person makes is critical. This becomes
much easier to do in Word 2013, thanks to a new feature called simple
markup view.
A red vertical line in the left margin indicates that changes have
been made to the document, while a word balloon in the right margin
indicates the presence of a comment. Click on the vertical line to
reveal both the edit changes and the comments; click on the word balloon
to show just the comments.
Microsoft
has also added a new viewing mode, called Reader. When you view a
document in this mode, each paragraph has a small triangle in front of
it. Click the triangle after you've finished reading its associated
paragraph, and the paragraph will collapse so that more text will
appear, without your having to scroll to another page.
I haven't had time to explore every new feature of Word 2013, but I
like what I've seen so far. It looks as though Microsoft has
significantly improved the application, adding some great new features
without mucking anything else up in the process. Nevertheless, my
opinion at this stage is based on very limited time with the product.
Excel 2013
Like the new version of Word, Excel 2013 feels fresh yet comfortingly
familiar. Microsoft has added several new whiz-bang data-analysis
tools, including one called Flash Fill. When you take an element of data
that you've already entered in one column and enter it in a second
column, Flash Fill will predict that you intend to do that for every
value in the second column, and will offer to fill in the second column
for you accordingly.
Excel's
Flash Fill feature will notice patterns in your data entry, predict
what you intend to do next, and then offer to fill in the rest of the
data for you.
Microsoft provided a sample two-column spreadsheet to demonstrate
how this feature works. The first column contained email addresses in
which each person's address was formatted as
first-name.last-name@domain-name. The second column was to be used to
store each person's first name.
Though that isn't the most realistic scenario imaginable, it works.
You establish the reference example by typing the first name of the
first person in the email address column; then, as you begin typing the
second person's first name, Excel predicts that you want to do the same
for every other value in the first column and offers to do just that
automatically. Press the Enter key, and the second column automatically
fills with first names.
Colors and symbols can help you analyze data more quickly, and
Excel 2013's new Quick Analysis tool uses these elements to identify and
highlight trends and changes. Select the rows and columns that you wish
to have analyzed, click the icon that appears in the bottom right
corner, and choose the conditional formatting that suits your needs.
Instead of looking at rows and columns of gray numbers, you'll instantly
see a spreadsheet formatted with color scales, bars, and icons.
Excel’s
Quick Analysis tool automatically suggests conditional formatting that
will help you visualize data locked in your spreadsheets.Charts
and graphs provide another easy way to visualize data, and spreadsheet
software has long permitted users to generate charts and graphs based on
the data they enter into its rows and columns.
Excel 2013's new Quick Analysis tool will automatically suggest the
most appropriate types of graphs--bar, pie, scatter, and so on--based
on the data set that you select.
My early impressions of Excel 2013 are about as favorable as my
corresponding impressions of Word 2013. Microsoft seems to have
introduced some solid new features without imposing a difficult learning
curve. Take that, ribbon haters.
We'll take a closer look at Outlook, Powerpoint, OneNote, and the rest of the suite soon.
--PCWorld Senior Editor Michael Brown
Office 2013 and Office 365 on a Tablet: First impressions
Microsoft is betting heavily on the idea that
tablets are
the future of PCs. Like Windows 8, Office 15 was built from the ground
up to take advantage of a tablet's unique features, while at the same
time addressing the limitations of the touchscreen interface for
creating content.
I ran Office 13 through its paces on a Samsung Series 7 Slate PC
running Windows 8 Consumer Preview to see how well it performs on a
tablet. Bear in mind that this tablet runs Windows 8 Pro, not Windows 8
RT, and that Office 2013 and Office 365 differ from the Office for RT
apps that will be available on ARM-based Windows 8 tablets.
Microsoft has done a great job of making the tools and functions of
the various Office applications accessible from a touchscreen interface
without lessening the capabilities. For example, holding your finger on
a misspelled word will pull up Office's list of possible corrections;
and holding your finger on virtually anything brings up the options
you'd normally find by right-clicking a mouse.
Microsoft did a nice job of fitting all of Word's functions into the screen space of a tablet.I
did sometimes find that the options on the ribbon interface were hard
to tap. The buttons are a bit small for my fingers, and you can't
pinch-to-zoom to enlarge the ribbon in Office 2013. On the other hand,
you can make the ribbon bar disappear to maximize the area available for
your document--in both Office 2013 and Office 365--which is nice.
The Office 2013 suite I installed on the tablet included Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Lync, and a
couple of bit players. The only apps available within Office 365,
however, are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Outlook exists in
Office 365 as well, but the option was grayed out on the software I
worked with.
One thing that I like about working with Office on the tablet is
more a function of Windows 8 and/or the hardware its running on than of
Office itself. The touchscreen virtual keyboard is sensitive and fluid
enough to allow me to type at very nearly full speed. Also, tapping the
symbols and numbers button brings up an actual number pad, which is much
more efficient for entering figures in an Excel spreadsheet.
That said, it was a little annoying to have to tap the keyboard
icon at the bottom of the display to open the virtual keyboard. It would
have been nice if Office applications had recognized when I tapped on a
text field, and responded by automatically opening the virtual
keyboard. Perhaps, though, Microsoft wanted to respect the limited
screen real estate of the tablet and let users navigate documents
without having the keyboard pop up all the time.
Overall, the experience is solid. Using it differs from using a
mouse and keyboard with a traditional PC, but it's a functional
arrangement. Microsoft has obviously invested a lot of thought and
effort in ensuring that the tablet experience that Office offers is
worthy of the Microsoft Office name.
