In what seems like a rather quickly thrown together announcement (similar to the Microsoft Surface announcement), Steve Ballmer announced the Office 2013 preview availability. Much of the introduction tied recent Microsoft changes into one direction for the company. Office 2013 is designed for the latest and greatest, meaning Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Microsoft Surface. It is also designed from the ground-up to operate as a service, utilizing “the cloud”. It also embraces social, speaking to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer.
CEO Steve Ballmer listed Office as Microsoft’s highest volume application, a tool for productivity from home to small business to enterprise. The generation is to be Microsoft’s “most ambitious” approach to the Office application.
Office is built to embrace the latest trends in tech. That means supporting touch, inking, visual style, ARM, and the new Application Mode. Office 2013 is to be best on Windows 8, utilizes the Cloud, and embraces social, and Microsoft used this announcement to show off new scenarios of use.
The new Office suites received a new look to match Windows 8 without changing the style too much from Office 2010. Applications utilize a collapsible ribbon to make content consumption easier, creation less distracting, while allowing easy editing with the option to pin the Ribbon.
Amongst new features in PowerPoint, a Presentation mode is very exciting to give presenters more confidence and control over their presentations.
Outlook 2013 also gets a facelift. It introduces quick actions on the left-side of Outlook for faster handling of email. It also includes a new inline reply function to make the email experience more fluid.
OneNote was also shown off. It has a radial menu to make a context menu more useful on touch.
Word 2013 introduces a new reading mode to make content consumption a better experience. Your templates are stored in the cloud, so you have access to them from one machine to another. Your spell-check Dictionary, documents, settings and latest works will be stored in SkyDrive.
Social aspects of SharePoint were demoed with a lot of interest for the potential of Yammer and Skype.
Learning Office 2013
Training for What’s new in Office 2013 programs like Excel 2013, Word 2013, PowerPoint 2013, and OneNote 2013.
Try it for yourself
Office Home and Student 2013 RT will be included in Windows 8 ARM-based devices.
You can read the full press release for today’s event and screenshots of the new features and logos in the new Office.
Explore the new Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and Outlook through Microsoft’s new feature summary articles.
Office 365 Preview including Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Small Business Premium, and Office 365 Enterprise is available today from http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en