Today, Microsoft will finally publically release the latest generation of Office, – Office 2013, but we have been lucky (and geeky) enough to have been running a preview version of the productivity suite for the last six months. Office 2013 has been built for a new generation of computing, and while its not a clean break away from what we know of as a productivity suite it is wildly different from its predecessors in more ways than one. We have listed out ‘five’ key features that make it shine on like a crazy diamond. Read on.
Installation: The Office experience begins when you start installing the suite. While previous versions of the suite have had long drawn out installations, Office 2013 leverages Microsoft Azure, its backbone in the cloud and this allows Microsoft to stream the installation. So you could be downloading Office, and if you are in an urgent need to use ‘Word’ like I do, then you could prioritize apps like Word. In the process, Word would be usable very quickly, while the other elements of suite are still being downloaded. This is very very cool; let alone a lifesaver, during a long drawn out installation.
Office as a service: With Office 2013, Microsoft is billing Office not as stand-alone product but rather as a service. This means people could opt to use it as a service across multiple devices and get regular updates also on the fly. Microsoft plans to have it running even on mobile products like the iPad, but currently it’s a no-go due to some in-app purchasing protocols set by Apple. This could however change in the future. Another benefit of this is that, people can either opt to user the web based Office 365 interface or could opt for a native offline experience, as Microsoft would stream the apps natively to any computer that is authorized to use a particular Office 365 account.
SkyDrive and Documents in the cloud: Office 2013 will save files in SkyDrive default, unless told to do so otherwise. This means no worrying about hard drive crashes and loosing documents. Only Microsoft can achieve this level of integration because it makes the most ubiquitous productivity suite in the world, the most ubiquitous OS in the world and also own a pretty good cloud storage service. If you are using Windows 8, SkyDrive is anyways part of the experience, and for Office SkyDrive becomes a file vault, or hard drive by default. To experience all this you’ll need to log-in to a Microsoft account, but there are many advantages of doing so. For instance, if you have a document saved on SkyDrive, a local cache of the same is created so that one can swimmingly work even if the Internet connections conks off.
Touch First: Touch is the mot obvious theme of Office 2013 considering the ‘Metro UI’ in Windows 8 is touch first. While for most of the major applications ‘Touch’ still feels like an after thought, the touch points have been made larger to make them more usable, more tools have been clearly exposed to the user and in applications like PowerPoint, the interface is truly meant for a tablet computing experience. In other words, if you are going to carry around a Windows 8/Windows RT tablet, then you need Office 2013. No other version of Office works as good as Office 2013 on a touch-screen, and that’s saying something because the previous versions of Office are downright unusable in a touch environment.
Web apps: Google is threatening Office with Google Drive. It is chipping away pretty quickly and is making the world warm up to the idea of a productivity suite that runs in a web browser. Microsoft has been in the game longer than anyone else and while Office 365 has existed for sometime, it never has been a viable competitor to Google Docs. But because this time around Microsoft is pitching Office 365 as a service that bundles the capabilities of a native app, things might change. Of course using applications like Word we realized pretty quickly that the Office 365 version is a toned down version of the app, but in comparison to Google Docs it’s a pretty robust option and I dare say the auto-correct is much more better on the Office 365 Word client. That said, it is a much heavier client, when compared to Google Docs, however if all your Docs are in SkyDrive and you use Office 2013, then using Word in the browser becomes a no-brainer.
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