Pros: interface much better for touch, tight integration with the cloud, attractive pricing, new featuresĬons: Cloud approach not to everyone's taste, third-party apps (so far) of dubious usefulness. If there's a touchscreen device in your future, it's certainly worth considering (and a version of Office 2013 comes with the RT Surface tablets anyway). How much of the new functionality you actually use remains to be seen, and whether you think it's worth upgrading for. However, for the home user, the pricing is much more attractive, especially if you go for the Office 365 subscription model. Not everyone will like the determined nudge towards the cloud, and given a lot of the negative feedback for the new look for Windows 8, not everyone is going to like the visual overhaul, either. You can also search for images and video online and edit/play those in the document. In most apps you can do screengrabs from within Office – no need to go via your imaging application – and insert them into the document. Admins will need to keep an eye on the number of connections users are making via both their own and work devices in a BYOD environment. One for admins to note is that Outlook can now connect to mail servers via ActiveSync, and in fact Exchange 2013 ditches MAPI altogether in favour of ActiveSync. You can also peek at your calendar while in another view, and get weather updates in the calendar view (no, I have no idea why that's been added, either). Outlook now pulls all your duplicate contacts together in one unified contact card in the People view (though I've found that a bit flaky about linking contacts to Facebook via the Office social connector). Excel will also suggest pivot tables for you, and flash-fill fields for you. In Excel, you can pull in data from a website via the in-app brower: useful if you want to play with the Guardian's datastore. The dialog box as you open it warns it could take some time, but on my desktop ( a fast machine home-built last year) the process was pretty much instant. Word can finally handle PDFs natively you can open a PDF file as a Word document, where it retains all its PDF cleverness but becomes editable. You can see the next animation/next slide, your timings and any notes. In Powerpoint, presenter view is vastly improved. Most of the Outlook apps require Exchange 2013, which may have gone RTM, but which won't be seen in the wild, never mind your office, for some time, so don't get too excited about those just yet. Office has caught the apps bug and third-party developers are already crafting widgets to add functionality. Outlook touch view Photograph: Kate Bevan/.uk And there are benefits to going for Office 365, the cloud version: for $99 a year (no UK price yet, and straight $-£ conversion isn't an indicator of UK pricing), home users can use it on five machines (there will be a Mac version too) while enterprise users can choose from packages that include hosted Exchange.Īn in-depth dig around all the new features is beyond the scope of Technophile, but here are some highlights: Apps! You will be able to buy standalone versions of Office 2013, but the pricing options for Office 365 are designed to be attractive. If you're working at a computer that doesn't have Office on it, your Skydrive documents will open for editing in Office Web Apps (on a Mac, PC or Windows phone – Android and iOS users will have to make do with just reading them for now). Sign in with your Hotmail, Windows Live, Technet or any other Microsoft ID and your Skydrive will be accessible on all your devices – Windows Phone, iOS and Android. The cloud stuff is right at the front of everything in this new version of Office – the default Save location is Skydrive, not My Documents. The visual style brings Office in line with the look of Windows 8, which is also very flat – no more Aero glass or 3D effects.Ĭrucially, it also optimises the suite for touch use – you can flip between a desktop mode and a touch mode, with the latter adding more space between icons in the ribbon (yes, the much-derided ribbon is in this version too, but you can hide it) to make it more fat-finger-friendly. The accent colour is fixed for each app you can choose from a range of frankly pointless grey-squiggle themes, and you can choose white, light grey or dark grey surrounds – and that's it. It takes a bit of getting used to.Īnd the options for personalising the look are minimal. It looks very different indeed gone are the bubblegum icons and candy colours of yesteryear, and in their place is a flat, sleek look. This new version of Office moves forward in two big ways: visually, and with its links to the cloud.
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