Microsoft has released the customer
preview of its latest version of Microsoft Office, which will be cloud-based and work best on
Windows 8.
Steve Ballmer announced the preview, claiming Office 2013 will provide consumers and businesses
with unparalleled productivity and flexibility.
“It is a cloud service and will fully light up when paired with Windows 8,” Steve Ballmer
said.
Ballmer announced three new Office 365 subscription services. Each new subscription offer will
include the new 2013
editions of the Office applications — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and
Access.
The new subscriptions include Office 365 Home Premium, designed for families and consumers. It
includes an additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype world minutes per
month.
Office 365 Small Business Premium has business-grade e-mail, shared calendars, website tools and
HD webconferencing, Office 365 ProPlus, designed for big customers who want to take advantage of
the cloud.
The software is designed to work on tablets with touchscreens to cater for the growing numbers
of tablet computer users.
Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said: "The strategy is vintage Microsoft. Generate deeper and
deeper integration between multiple products, marginalise products down to the level of core
product features and bundle, bundle, bundle.”
There will be more details about features and pricing in the autumn.
What Microsoft says about Office 2013
- 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 e-mail
responses and convert them automatically to text. Use your stylus as a laser pointer when
presenting. Colour 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.
- SkyDrive. Office saves documents to SkyDrive by default, so your content is always
available across your tablet, PC and phone. Your documents are also available offline and sync when
you reconnect.
- Roaming. Once signed-in to Office, your personalised settings, including your most
recently used files, templates and even your custom dictionary, roam with you across virtually all
of your devices. Office even remembers where you last left off and brings you right back to that
spot in a single click.
- Office on Demand. With a subscription, you can access Office even when you are away from
your PC by streaming full-featured applications to an internet-connected Windows-based PC.
- New subscription services. The new Office is available as a cloud-based subscription
service. As subscribers, consumers automatically get future upgrades in addition to exciting cloud
services, including Skype world minutes and extra SkyDrive storage. Subscribers receive multiple
installs for everyone in the family and across their devices.
- Yammer. Yammer delivers a secure, private social network for businesses. You can sign up
for free and begin using social networking instantly. Yammer offers integration with SharePoint and
Microsoft Dynamics.
- Stay connected. Follow people, teams, documents and sites in SharePoint. View and embed
pictures, videos and Office content in your activity feeds to stay current and update your
colleagues.
- People Card. Have an integrated view of your contacts everywhere in Office. The People
Card includes presence information complete with pictures, status updates, contact information and
activity feeds from Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
- Skype. The new Office comes with Skype. When you subscribe, you get 60 minutes of Skype
world minutes every month. Integrate Skype contacts into Lync and call or instant message anyone on
Skype.
- Digital note-taking. Keep your notes handy in the cloud and across multiple devices with
OneNote. Use what feels most natural to you — take notes with touch, pen or keyboard, or use them
together and switch easily back and forth.
- Reading and markup. The Read mode in Word provides a modern and easy-to-navigate reading
experience that automatically adjusts for large and small screens. Zoom in and out of content,
stream videos within documents, view revision marks and use touch to turn pages.
- Meetings. PowerPoint features a new Presenter View that privately shows your current and
upcoming slides, presentation time, and speaker notes in a single glance. While presenting, you can
zoom, mark up and navigate your slides with touch and stylus. Lync includes multiparty HD video
with presentations, shared OneNote notebooks and a virtual whiteboard for collaborative
brainstorming.
- Eighty-two-inch touch-enabled displays. Conduct more engaging meetings, presentations
and lessons, whether in person or virtually, with these multitouch and stylus-enabled displays from
Perceptive Pixel.