Source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/46542/office-2013-preview-hands-on-review
It's been about three years since Microsoft unveiled a new version of
Office, and particularly with Windows 8 just months away from dropping,
the software has been well overdue for an upgrade. Today, Redmond
unveiled the latest edition -- Office 2013 (aka
Office 15)
-- which the company will be showing in a preview stage until the final
version goes on sale (hit up the source link if you want to download it
for yourself).
Perhaps the biggest news isn't any single feature
Microsoft's added to Word (hello, easy YouTube embeds!), but how and
where you'll access your files. With this version, the company is moving
to a subscription-based model wherein your Office files are tied to
your Microsoft ID. Once you sign up, you can download the various
desktop apps to a certain number of devices and, as with Windows 8, your
settings, SkyDrive files and even the place where you left off in a
document will follow you from device to device. (It's telling, we think,
that files now save to the cloud by default.) As you'd expect, too,
this version is also more tablet-friendly than editions past, with a
touch mode that widens the spacing between onscreen objects and flattens
menus. In Word and PowerPoint, you'll also find a read-only mode that
turns documents into full-screen editions, whose pages you can swipe
through as you would an e-book or digital magazine.
Of course,
Microsoft included plenty of granular updates like PDF editing and a
behind-the-scenes Presenter View in PowerPoint. Fortunately for you,
curious power users, we've been spending the better part of a week
testing the software on a
Samsung Series 7 Slate
loaded up with Windows 8. So join us past the break where we'll give
you a detailed breakdown of what's new, along with screenshots and
detailed first impressions.
Overview
General look and feel
For those of you who thought Microsoft would
completely
overhaul Office ahead of the Windows 8 release, let's put it this way:
if you could survive the transition to Ribbon menus in Office 2007,
you'll quickly feel at home here. The Ribbon is, indeed, still the
cornerstone of the Office experience, the visual metaphor permeating
Word, Excel, Outlook and every other application in the suite.
Nonetheless, Microsoft has made some subtle changes to the UI, and
they're all quite important. For starters, no matter what app you're
using, you'll find your name and Microsoft account photo in the
upper-right corner -- a reminder that the cloud is now the linchpin to
the Office experience. From there, you can click the photo to adjust
your account settings, swap in a new picture or even switch accounts.
Cloud integration
Being able to save to the cloud is hardly a new feature in Office, but
for the first time saving to SkyDrive is the default, not the C drive.
(SkyDrive Pro support is coming as well, says Microsoft.) And when you
do hit save, you'll even see a progress bar on the bottom of the screen,
confirming your latest draft made it safely to the cloud. As you'd
expect, of course, the built-in options for saving to the cloud are
limited to Microsoft's own services (SkyDrive and SharePoint). If you
want to upload to Dropbox or Google Drive, you'll have to do it outside
Office.
And since your files are stored online by default, it's
fairly easy to share them on the web as well. Throughout these various
Office apps, you can share your work with someone by sending them a URL,
allowing them to follow along in a browser even if they don't happen to
have Office installed on their local machine. To do this, just hit
File, Share and choose either "Get link" or "Invite people," if you want
them to have editing privileges. If, for some reason, the version fails
to upload, you'll see a banner stretching across the top of the screen,
prompting you to try that save again. From the same sharing menu, you
can also post your work to a social network or email a document as an
attachment, but that last bit isn't new.
Another perk: a feature
called Resume Reading allows you pick up exactly where you left off,
even if you resume editing on another device. (Okay, okay, Amazon's
Kindle, for one, already bookmarks e-books this way, but isn't it a
relief not to lose your place in a 44-item slide deck?) Though this
feature doesn't apply to most apps in the Office family, you will see it
in Word as well as PowerPoint.
Lastly, in various Office apps
it's now easier to toss in a photo you found online. For example, Word
is now integrated with Facebook and Flickr so that you pull pictures
straight from there, instead of having to download it and then manually
insert it into the doc. Obviously the only caveat is that you need an
internet connection, so maybe save a Disney World photo or two on your
desktop for offline emergencies.
Touch mode
Microsoft has made some subtle changes to the UI, and they're all quite important.
Across the various apps, too, you can use a new touch mode to make the
software a little more finger-friendly. To expose this option, click on
that small arrow in the upper-left corner of the screen -- you know, the
one you already use to customize which icons are visible and which ones
are hidden. Once you select touch mode, the icon that appears should
look like a circle with a dotted line around it.
It's easy to
imagine that, with the press of a button, Office would somehow take on
more of a Metro-inspired look, with large, finger-friendly icons and --
dare we say it -- a more dumbed-down interface. Actually, the
adjustments Office makes in touch mode are far more subtle. In short,
enabling this mode widens the spacing between onscreen objects, making
it less likely that you'll tap the wrong thing. This mode also causes
various menus to flatten so that you can see options with less finger
input involved. Again, that doesn't mean the objects on screen suddenly
become larger to accommodate finger input, but this mechanism at least
cuts down on the amount of tapping you'll end up doing.
Etc.
Spend enough time in Office 2013 and you'll notice dozens of visual
flourishes that serve to give the software that extra bit of spit and
polish. Office comes bearing glossy new icons, for one. Different apps
like Word and PowerPoint have improved alignment guides, which become
visible when you're inserting tables and other objects (we first noticed
this while inserting a YouTube clip).
Also, animated transitions
are everywhere: a slide of the screen when you hit the File tab, Excel
charts growing before your eyes. As a Microsoft rep explained it, the
idea is to offer some visual feedback to new users, who might not
totally know their way around yet. Whether you require that kind of
babying is debatable, but we're sure of this much: the animations are
slick -- pretty, even -- and everything about the suite feels
fast: fluid, brisk and refreshingly devoid of bugs.
Getting started
This isn't your old-school software installation, kids. The beauty of
Office 2013's software-as-a-service model is that you get automatic
updates and all that jazz you've come to expect from the other web-based
services in your life. So it's fitting, then, that the installation
begins not with a software download, but by selecting your preview
version and then signing in with your Microsoft / Windows Live ID. Wait a
few minutes for the setup to unfold, and
then download Office
to your various devices. (Take note: Office 2013 will run on Windows 7
and the Win8 Release Preview; it's not compatible with Vista, and it
won't work with earlier builds of Windows 8, such as the Consumer
Preview.) Armed with a speedy WiFi connection, we were up and running in
five minutes and, again, the experience was smooth and crash-free.
This might be a good time to clarify the minimum hardware requirements.
So long as you have 3.5GB of free disk space and an X86 or X64 system
clocked at 1GHz or higher, you should be good to go. DirectX10 graphics
are required, along with a minimum resolution of 1024 x 576. Microsoft
also recommends 1GB of RAM for 32-bit systems, and 2GB for 64-bit
machines.
Word
Look and feel
When you open Word for the first time, you'll notice some changes to
that introductory start page. Now, the left-hand pane shows recent
documents, while the area to the right showcases templates, some of them
new. Of course, the thing you'll probably want most – a blank document –
is still sitting in an easy-to-spot corner, toward the top of the
screen.
Head on into a blank document and you'll see the Ribbon
UI has made room for a new Design tab, which claims to let you make all
your design changes in one place. Options include things like fonts,
paragraph spacing, themes and adding watermarks to documents.
Thankfully, though, Microsoft kept the feature where if you highlight
text and then hover over it with your mouse, you'll see some pop-up
controls right there, allowing you to change the font color and make
other simple tweaks.
Tracking changes
Of all the new features in Office 2013, this is the one we Engadget
editors hold dearest to our hearts. With this version of Office,
tracking changes has been tweaked so that unless you're actively reading
through changes and comments, all that noise simply shows up as a bunch
of red lines. When you're ready to focus on editing, just click the
line to expand the thread. And we do mean threads. Now, if you get into a
back-and-forth with another editor ("Can we call this phone a Galaxy
Note clone?" "No"), those comments will appear in a single conversation
that flows alongside the page, in the margins. If you've ever used track
changes to collaborate on a document, you know that previously such an
inane exchange would mean seeing a separate comment bubble for each
person's response, even if they were all addressing the same issue.
And control freaks, rejoice: you can now lock tracking, which means someone needs to enter a password to make Word
stop tracking changes. The point being, unless that person knows the password, he or she can't make any changes without you knowing.
Live Layout and adding online video
It's not like you
couldn't
previously add online video to an Office document, but it was a pain --
hardly a beginner-level move. Now, Word allows you to insert clips
directly from YouTube, Bing Video or any other site, so long as you have
the HTML embed code handy. Just click the Insert tab in the Ribbon,
then click – you guessed it – "Online Video." Again, if we wanted we
could paste in some code from Viddler, Engadget's hosting site, and
insert a review video we had already uploaded. For the purposes of this
walkthrough, though, we'll pretend we're searching for something on
YouTube.
When you search, the results appear in a small pop-up
that obscures the screen (not a browser pop-up, but a dialog box within
Word). All of the search results appear as small thumbnails, and if you
hover over them, you can see the title of the video (how else are you
supposed to know if you've got the auto-tune remix?). Helpfully, you can
also see how long a video is, so if you were looking for a music video,
say, you might have an easier time weeding out the 50-second ones that
obviously aren't complete. You can also preview the video first so that
you don't go through the hassle of embedding it only to realize it's not
what you wanted.
Once you insert the video, it's easy to resize
it by dragging the corners or sides. There are also little pop-up tabs
next to the frame, which you can click to select a layout option (e.g.,
in line with the text) or do things like cut or copy it. In theory, you
can also watch a video from inside Word, without having to open up the
browser. It doesn't bode well, though, that the first video we inserted
had its permissions set in such a way that we had to visit YouTube if we
were going to watch. Unfortunately, there's no way of clarifying that
before you insert a video.
Also, in a new feature called Live
Layout, the text will automatically wrap itself around a video, chart or
anything else you insert into the text. And that happens in real time,
even as you drag the object around. This is what we mean when we talk
about Office's solid performance: as impressive as these new features
are, they feel remarkably lightweight and nimble.
Editing PDFs
For a while now, Word has allowed users to save finished docs as PDF
files. But until now, doing the opposite -- editing a PDF -- has
required additional software, much of it not free. Here, though, when
you open a PDF you can edit it as you would a Word document, and then
you can either save it as such, or save it as another PDF file. We had
no problem taking a PDF email attachment, typing in additional material,
saving it as a PDF and then viewing it in Windows Reader. Okay,
depending on who you are this might not be the most exciting new
features in Office 2013, but it is certainly one of the most useful.
Reading mode
Now here's a feature Microsoft might not have bothered to include if it
didn't imagine people using Office on tablets. The company's added a
new reading mode -- a full-screen, read-only view that mimics the
experience of reading an e-book on a tablet. To enter it, just go to the
View tab in the Ribbon and find "Read Mode" all the way on the left.
(Psst: This works in PowerPoint, too.)
Once you're in, the
document takes up the whole screen, save for the Windows taskbar at the
bottom. Like an e-book -- but very much unlike a Word document -- the
pages scroll from side to side by default, instead of top-to-bottom. (If
you like, you can switch to a so-called page view with vertical
scrolling.) All told, it's very intuitive to find your way around: there
are onscreen left and right arrows, which you can click, but you can
also just swipe the screen to advance to the next page. You can also
adjust the color of the text: it's black-on-white by default, but you
can also choose white-on-black or a sepia theme.
Lastly, when
you're in reading mode, there's a separate feature called Object Zoom,
which allows you to expand a photo or table within the text by double
clicking or tapping it. Like any good e-reader app, you can also search
for specific words in the text, or perform a search (in this case, with
Bing).
Onscreen keyboard Sticking with this
tablet theme for a moment, Microsoft built in the same well-spaced
touchscreen keyboard you'll find in Windows 8. We especially appreciate
that the apostrophe is to the right of the "L" key, as it is on a
physical keyboard. There's also a visible Ctrl key so that you can press
Ctrl + S to save your work. Lastly, we had a good experience with the
predictive spelling, which presents suggestions in the form of small,
unobtrusive pop-ups.
Excel
Flash Fill
We can remember a time when Sparklines, those charts-within-cells, were
the marquee new feature for Excel. This year, though, you'll notice
that many of the major new additions don't necessarily aim to jazz up
spreadsheets so much as take the tedium out of the number-crunching.
Exhibit A: Flash Fill. It's a feature that recognizes your data patterns
to the point where it should be able to predict what belongs in the
remaining blank cells and fill them in for you. For example, if you were
to make a spreadsheet detailing on what days different departments were
using the main conference room, Excel would eventually pick up on the
fact that every marketing executive has a meeting there Tuesday, while
the publicity people are due there on Thursday.
In theory, you
just have to enter some of that data and then go to the Data tab, where
you press the Flash Fill button to make it fill in the rest. For
instance, in a demo spreadsheet provided by Microsoft, one column shows a
list of company email addresses, each of which follow the format
"firstname.lastname." After typing two first names in the blank "First
name" column, Excel filled in the rest. Ditto when we added a column for
last names.
In our own testing, we enjoyed similar success, but discovered that Flash Fill doesn't make sense of
all
data -- for example, it doesn't recognize "yes" and "no" as values. So,
there might well be times when Excel won't be able to survey your data
set and pick up on the patterns within.
Suggestions for visuals
Fortunately, Excel includes some new features that prove to be a little
more intelligent than Flash Fill. These include recommendations for
so-called PivotTables as well as charts. Using the data we just talked
about (employees, their departments and their health insurance status)
the Recommended PivotTable feature (located under the Insert tab) came
up with a few logical options: employee count by department, and a count
of insured versus uninsured workers. Sounds right to us. Likewise, the
Recommended Charts feature (also in the Insert section) offered up the
same ideas, only represented in pretty bar graph form.
Timeline Slicer
A new addition to Office's collection of so-called Slicers, Timeline
allows you to filter data by certain time periods (think: sales data for
2011).
Quick Analysis
Though the name would suggest otherwise, this feature isn't so much a shortcut for
making sense
of your data as it is a way to preview different visuals. As you can
see in that screenshot above, once you click on the corresponding Quick
Analysis icon you'll see various formatting options, and as you hover
over them you'll see the document change accordingly, giving you a
glimpse of what you'll see if you end up selecting that option.
PowerPoint
Presenter View
So no fancy new charts in Excel, but lots of ways to make sifting
through your data a little more efficient. It's a similar story with
PowerPoint: even more than animated transitions, Microsoft is focusing
on behind-the-scenes features designed to take some of the anxiety out
of presentations. For starters, when you plug in a projector, Windows
will automatically extend your desktop onto that larger screen so that
you don't have to fiddle with the setup in front of your audience.
Once you're plugged in and ready to start your talk, you'll have the
option of using a new presenter view, visible only on the screen you're
using (press Alt + F5 to bring it up). Not unlike the presenter screen
in Apple's Keynote software, this shows you the time elapsed, as well as
any notes you may have written yourself. You can also enlarge text,
teleprompter-style and pinch the slider to see the full slide deck --
very similar to how you can pinch to get a bird's eye view of your
Windows 8 Start screen. The idea, says Microsoft, is to be able to
nimbly skip forward a few slides if someone in the audience asks a
question about some topic you haven't gotten to yet. If you do rearrange
the slide, it won't be visible to the audience on the big screen. None
of the behind-the-scenes stuff will be.
As ever, you can also scribble, or "ink," on slides using either a pen
or your finger. (You'll have to tap an icon first to enable this.)
You'll see this as an option under the Review tab when you're marking up
slides, but you can also do it during your presentation, from the
Presenter View screen.
Miscellaneous The
rest of the new PowerPoint features are a motley bunch. You can merge
shapes to create custom ones. In addition to using an eyedropper to
select colors, you can also match a color to an accompanying photo.
Music playback has also been improved so that you can now play a track
in the background across multiple slides or the whole presentation.
Additionally, Microsoft has expanded its list of supported media file
types to include .MP4 files, meaning you can export to .MP4 as well as
play such files natively without having to install QuickTime.
Outlook
Look and feel
In its current incarnation, Outlook still looks like, well, Outlook,
but you'll notice that many of the options aren't immediately visible.
Much like there's no fixed Start button in Windows 8, the flags in
Outlook only appear if you hover next to a message with your mouse. Also
new with this version: a weather bar stretching across the top of your
calendar. You can manually change the location, but by default, Office
shows only one set of weather forecasts at a time. Another, more
miscellaneous change: if you've begun to respond to an email, but saved
it as a draft, the word "Draft" will appear in red in your inbox, next
to the message (yes, just like Gmail).
Peeks
With this version, the company is also introducing fly-over menus
called Peeks, which show things like calendar appointments, to-do items
and information about your contacts. To find these, look for the icons
stacked on top of each other in the lower left corner of the screen.
Mouse over the calendar icon, for instance, and you'll see a live,
pop-up window that allows you to glance at your agenda without having to
toggle between tabs to check your schedule. If you're wide open, you'll
see a message saying you have no appointments; if you are booked, it'll
tell you when.
Social connectors
Continuing this theme of showing as much information in one place as
possible (without you having to click to a different screen): if you're
reading an email from someone, you can click an arrow at the bottom of
the screen to pull up the People Pane. While this pane isn't new (you
could previously see your meetings with that person and also your email
history), you can now glance at that person's social networking
goings-on. For now, Outlook natively integrates with Facebook and
LinkedIn, but not Twitter, for whatever reason. (There is, however, an
API that makes this possible.)
As we quickly learned, this
feature is worthwhile mainly if you're on Facebook and also friends with
the people you're conversing with. Obviously, you won't see updates
from a business associate you aren't connected to on Facebook. At the
same time, the LinkedIn integration is fairly useless unless someone is
super active on that site; you'll only see recent activity, and even
then, the tidbits tend to be uninteresting. After all, do you really
need to know if someone just added someone else to their network?
Really, Twitter integration would make this new feature so much more
valuable: people are nosy enough to care about other people's tweets and
fortunately, most of us don't bother to lock our accounts.
SharePoint integration
In news that will matter most to the IT guys reading this, Microsoft
has improved the integration between Outlook and SharePoint so that
SharePoint groups now have their own mailboxes. From here, you see
documents stored on SharePoint without leaving Outlook. (To edit them,
of course, you'll need to open the corresponding Office app.) We also
appreciate that the reverse is also possible: you can drag and drop
attachments into the docs folder for SharePoint and they'll upload to
your team's site.
OneNote
The biggest news here is that OneNote, that receptacle for random
thoughts and musings, will be available as a standalone, Metro-styled
Windows 8 app. Though we caught a glimpse of it in an advance meeting
with Microsoft, it wasn't available for testing during our preview
period, so our impressions are more limited here. Rounding out the list,
OneNote is also getting a full-screen view, auto-save, improved table
tools, enhanced scribbling (nay, inking) functionality, integration with
Outlook calendars, more efficient search and the ability to record
audio alongside notes.
Business apps
Since most of our readers aren't suit-wearing business travelers so
much as exceptionally well-informed consumers, we're not going to delve
into the new enterprise-grade features in nearly as much detail as Word,
Outlook and other core apps. If corporate software rings your bell,
though, we've got a quick rundown below of what's new:
- Lync:
Microsoft's messaging and video chatting client can now show up to five
video streams simultaneously (previously, it could only handle multiple
voices at once). By default, the active speaker will be
promoted to the top. If more than five people are speaking, you can set
Lync to prioritize whose video stream is being shown (those not featured
will have photo thumbnails instead of a video stream). If you like, of
course, you can also cherry pick whose video you're seeing.
- Publisher:
With Publisher, you can now import all your pictures to a single
canvas, making it easy to experiment with possible images. Microsoft has
also added text, shape and picture effects; a Mailings tab in the
Ribbon; and the ability to use your own photos as page backgrounds. As
with other apps we've talked about, you can share a URL with people
where they can view your work in the browser. The new feature for easily
adding photos from online sources applies here, too.
- Visio:
Office's standalone diagram creator gets updated shapes, as well as
easier workflows for creating organizational charts and tweaking
diagrams. Microsoft has also revised the app so that if you change
shapes, you won't affect the entire diagram layout you've been working on.
Versions and subscription plans
So far, Microsoft hasn't revealed any pricing information for Office
2013, though it has outlined the different forms Office will take. There
will, of course, be the web-based service Office 365 along with the
desktop Office 2013 suite. Additionally, Office will be available on
ARM-based tablets running Windows RT -- albeit, with Word, Excel,
PowerPoint and OneNote only. Finally, enterprises can purchase a
server-specific version capable of hosting Exchange, SharePoint, Project
and Lync. In cases such as those, businesses can choose cloud hosting,
local servers or a combination of the two.
Oh, and if you're
wondering about Office for Mac, that will be available too, but
Microsoft isn't ready to give the public a preview just yet.
All told, here are the specific products Microsoft is previewing right now:
-
Office 365 Home Premium: Can be installed on up to five devices; users
get an extra 20GB of SkyDrive storage; Word, PowerPoint, Excel,
Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher are included.
- Office
365 Small Business Preview: Can be issued to up to 10 users, with five
installations each; adds "professional mail, shared documents and HD
videoconferencing."
- Office 365 ProPlus Preview: Can be issued
to up to 25 users, with five installations each; includes Word,
PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath and
Lync.
- Office 365 Enterprise Preview: In addition to the above applications, this version includes SharePoint online and Lync Online.
Wrap-up
Sometimes it's the little things, like saving documents to SkyDrive, that charm us most. Even more than any actual
feature
in Office 2013, what left us most enchanted during our testing period
was the moment we powered down our Series 7 tablet, turned it back on,
launched Word and found the cursor exactly where we left it. The best
thing about Office is not what it does better than Office 2010, but how
much more nimble it is in following you from device to device, from
shut-down to start-up again. Beyond that, no one single feature of
Office 2013 is dazzling, per se, but it doesn't matter: everything here,
from YouTube embeds to the chart generator in Excel, works as promised
and is intuitive to use. At the same time, the interface doesn't mark a
radical departure from previous versions, so even casual users with no
use for PivotTables should be able to find their way around.
The
one caveat we feel compelled to offer is that although Office 2013 has
been updated to keep pace with Windows 8, this is not some sort of magic
bullet that will suddenly make Office a pleasure to use on tablet
devices: while reading mode is fantastic and touch mode is a step in the
right direction, we still wouldn't want to work with spreadsheets
without the help of a mouse. That disclaimer aside, we've found very few
faults with Office 2013 -- it's fast, polished and painless to use.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/16/microsoft-office-15-preview/