Microsoft Office 2013 Released

Microsoft Office 2013 Released

Microsoft on Monday 16-July-2013 announced the next major version of its Office productivity suite, called Office 2013. Office 2013 is completely touch-optimized in light of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system, and it adds a wide range of new functionality and cloud-based features to apps like .

Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well. With Windows 8, Microsoft has created an operating system that is, at least in part, genuinely usable with nothing more than fingers. While it took the company a long time to recognize that finger-based touch systems were more approachable than stylus-based ones, and that touch-based software needed to be designed to accommodate the imprecision that fingers imply, Microsoft has its finger-based platform at last with the new Metro-style interface and new Metro-style applications. Office 2013, however, isn't a new Metro-style application.

Instead, the suite contains two Metro-style Office apps: a new OneNote client (that will work alongside a regular desktop version) and a Lync client. Everything else is a desktop application, which poses a problem. Office is an important product for Microsoft and makes up a significant part of the Windows 8 sales pitch. Windows RT, the ARM variant of Windows 8 that will be used on the company's Surface tablets, will ship with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and the presence of these applications will be one of the big things that sets Windows RT apart from the iPad. For these programs to have any value at all, they have to be touch friendly.

Ready to touch:

• Historically, the Office team never made any concessions to Microsoft's broader tablet ambitions. With the exception of OneNote, the Office apps have never been comfortable for pen users, and it seemed that the Office team was happy with that. That's no longer the case with Office 2013. The suite contains a range of improvements to make finger access better. Across the board, menus created in the main UI are given wider spacing when invoked with fingers. The same is true of the hovering formatting toolbars in Word and Excel; when touching the screen, they're much larger and easier to manipulate.
• The sizing of the rest of the UI is controlled by a new "full screen" mode that changes the interface to better accommodate touch input. In theory, the applications will use this mode by default when installed on tablet hardware (though they didn't for me on a mouseless Samsung tablet); otherwise, the applications all have a full screen mode button next to the minimize button.
• Hit this button and a few things happen. The ribbon, title bar, and quick access toolbar all disappear, replaced by a strip along the top of the window with a "..." either in the center (for OneNote) or on the right-hand side (for everything else). Tap that strip and the ribbon and status bars reappear. The status bar also disappears and similarly reappears when the "..." strip is touched. Windows 8's standard "swipe from the top of the screen" gesture doesn't bring up the ribbon; I think it would be more consistent if it did.
• When the ribbon is displayed in this mode, its spacing is altered to make the targets a little bigger. This is especially apparent on the various menus that can pop up from the ribbon; these are normally quite tightly packed.
• As well as these spacing adjustments, the applications now respond to two-finger zooming. This mainly performs a conventional zoom, but in Outlook's calendar view it does a semantic zoom, allowing you to zoom right in to a single day, or all the way out to a month at a time. To this, Word also adds a tap-to-zoom feature when in Read Mode, to allow tables, images, or other objects to be zoomed in a similar fashion to touch-based browsers.
• And that's about it, the full extent of the finger support that Microsoft has added to Office 2013. If it doesn't sound like much, there's a good reason for that: it isn't. For stylus users, the company says that accuracy has been improved, particularly in OneNote, but using the software with fingers is problematic.

Inappropriate touching:

• First of all, there's all the stuff that's simply not touch enabled. The options screens, for example. While the drop-down lists do pick up the wider spacing when invoked with touch, that's about the only concession they make: tightly packed checkboxes and radio buttons remain the norm.
• Even worse are the dialog boxes such as Excel's "Format Cells" or Word's "Paragraph." These don't have any concessions to touch control at all. Want to set up an e-mail account in Outlook? You'll be using the same dialogs as you do in Outlook 2010, in spite of their mouse-and-keyboard design.
• Microsoft has even added new features in Office 2013 that are inaccessible to touch users. Outlook 2013's "peek" feature, which allows quick glancing at calendar, contacts, and tasks, is invoked with a mouse hover—something that has no analog for touch users.
• These are not touch applications, and you will not want to use them on touch systems. They're designed for mice and they're designed for keyboards, and making the buttons on the ribbon larger does nothing to change that fundamental fact.
• The Office 2013 apps also highlight more general flaws with Windows 8's touch support of desktop applications. The on-screen keyboard has two modes; it can either be free-floating above the desktop applications, or it can be docked to the bottom of the screen, which forces applications to resize to fit the remaining area. This latter mode is important for accessing, for example, forms that reach the bottom of a webpage, as the form fields would normally lie behind the keyboard.
• Used in this docked mode, I found many visual glitches, particularly in Word. Tapping the "..." button to display the ribbon would dismiss the keyboard, but the status bar would then appear mid-way up the screen, as if it were trying to make room for the (now invisible) keyboard. I'm sure such issues are fixable—PowerPoint does quite a good job of making space for the keyboard and ensuring that the text you're editing is visible—but they point to the generic difficulties that Windows 8 has in trying to retrofit touch accessibility to desktop applications.
• Controls such as Word's font picker become very awkward, too. This is a drop-down box, so it gets the extra spacing when in touch mode, but it's also editable, so the on-screen keyboard appears whenever you use it. The result is that you can only see a small number of fonts in the list, making the whole thing annoying to use. More generally, you find yourself having to shuffle around the screen, moving the keyboard and dialog boxes around so that the part you want to use is visible. 
• Conversely, the on-screen keyboard doesn't appear at all in Excel, whether you tap in a cell or in the formula bar to enter some text; you have to manually bring it up by pressing the keyboard icon on the taskbar.
• Using Office 2013 on a touch machine is, at least in the public preview version now available, a tremendously frustrating experience. Even with the auto-hide ribbon, the Office applications are simply too complex to cope well with half their screen being covered up by an on-screen keyboard, and their interfaces are far too big for a simple band-aid such as "make the ribbon spacing a little larger" to be anywhere near adequate.
• Things are a little better for stylus users—though we note that the ARM-powered Surface tablet doesn't support stylus input—because a stylus is almost precise enough to manipulate the checkboxes, radio buttons and so on—but the on-screen keyboard problems remain.
• Clearly, this is not exposing the full power and complexity of Office 2013 to finger users; too much is still designed around pixel-perfect pointing devices. The Office team appears to be positioning touch support more as a way of enabling simple edits to be made as a kind of fall-back—a stopgap solution for those times when the mouse and keyboard aren't available.

The need for simplicity:

As a set of reader applications, the suite works tolerably well. Opening and scrolling through documents works, and because these are the full Office programs, files are displayed with full fidelity and functionality. However, in this context, I find it hard to understand why Microsoft made the effort it has; Even Office 2010 works adequately well for just reading documents on a touch PC.

• Unfortunately, as soon as one ventures beyond mere reading, the experience becomes unsatisfactory. Finger users attempting to make edits will find themselves regularly dumped into interfaces simply not designed for imprecise input, and even if they stick to the "main" user interface (the ribbon and pop-up toolbars), that interface works poorly. The interactions with the on-screen keyboard are frustrating and the interface is cluttered, leaving too little of the working area actually visible.
• Having the real Office applications and their perfect support for Office documents is valuable—but this needs to be married to simpler interfaces that are engineered around reading and light editing, and that remove entire features and user interfaces that are too complex for finger usage.
• As things stand, far from being a valuable feature of Windows RT, the Office 2013 applications threaten to make it worse.

Highlights from Office 2013 as per Microsoft’s press release:

• Touch everywhere. Office responds to touch as naturally as it does to keyboard and mouse. Swipe your finger across the screen or pinch and zoom to read your documents and presentations. Author new content and access features with the touch of a finger.
• Inking. Use a stylus to create content, take notes and access features. Handwrite email responses and convert them automatically to text. Use your stylus as a laser pointer when presenting. Color your content and erase your mistakes with ease.
• New Windows 8 applications. OneNote and Lync represent the first new Windows 8 style applications for Office. These applications are designed to deliver touch-first experiences on a tablet. A new radial menu in OneNote makes it easy to access features with your finger.
• Included in Windows RT. Office Home and Student 2013 RT, which contains new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, will be included on ARM-based Windows 8 devices, including Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft made an early version of its Windows 8 operating system available to consumers early to test, and now the company is doing the same with Office 2013 — a free Office 2013 preview version is available immediately, and a download link follows below.

FAQ: Microsoft previews Office 2013, suite sub plans

Computerworld - Monday, Microsoft unwrapped the next edition of its Office money maker at a press event and simultaneously launched a public preview for users to try out now.

CEO Steve Ballmer touted the new software as "the most ambitious release of Office that we've ever done," then ceded the stage to others who demonstrated some of the suite's features and functionality. And while there were questions left on the table -- when will it be released and how much will it cost being most prominent -- it's clear this isn't your dad's Office: For one thing, Microsoft's breaking with a 21-year tradition in how it will sell its next productivity collection.

Let's cut to the chase, though: What you want is to do is try it out, right?

How do you get the Customer Preview? What do you need to run it? What's the most important news?
We have answers to the out-of-the-gate questions.

What's Microsoft calling the new suite?

During Monday's roll-out, Microsoft referred to it as "the new Office" without sticking a numerical label on it. But "Office 2013" will be used as the nameplate for the traditional shrink-wrapped product that provides a perpetual license for one upfront fee. And then there's the whole Office 365 thing....

How do I get it?
Start here, the download portal for what Microsoft's calling "Customer Preview" -- note its continued refusal to use the term "beta," which it also eschewed for Windows 8. Pick your poison, enter your Windows account login credentials and you're off.

Can I run it?
Yes, as long as you have a PC powered by Windows 7 or the Windows 8 Release Preview, the last in the short series of sneak peeks that Microsoft has offered for the upcoming operating system. (Release Preview debuted May 31, for those watching the calendar.)
If you've one of the 50.3% of PC users working on either the 11-year-old Windows XP or the five-year-old Vista, though, you're out of luck.

The fact that Office 2013 won't run on XP is no shock -- after all, it faces retirement in 21 months, in mid-April 2014, and Microsoft would like nothing better than for XP to just go away, as in yesterday. But the lack of support for Vista was a surprise, at least to us.

I don't need Windows 8 to run the new Office?

Nope, although CEO Steve Ballmer on Monday pitched Windows 8 as the "best" platform for the new suite and in a statement claimed that it "will fully light up when paired with Windows 8."

Download Microsoft Office 2013