Johannesburg, 19 Jul 2012
Microsoft recently took the wraps off the next version of the Office productivity suite, taking major steps towards cloud services and tablet integration.
I downloaded the customer preview version of Office 2013 and am in the process of evaluating it. What follows is my first impressions of the suite.
Getting started
Installing Office is a much more Web-friendly process, with the drive towards SaaS and cloud. An installer downloads the components and installs it, and the software is ready to use long before the “wrapping up” step is complete. Online, it's Office 365. Installed, it's Office 2013, but it's the same suite in different guises.
The installation guides you through setting up cloud storage, and offers canned demos to introduce new features. The introductory slides, for example, are actually a short PowerPoint presentation. But, who reads the manual? I dove right in.
As an incremental point-release upgrade, Office 2013 would be nice enough. Some neat new features and (yet another) IU overhaul. But seen as a major new release, with its tablet versions, Web apps, and deep cloud integration, Office 2013 is a lot more impressive. It's not only a major new version of an existing product line, it's also the realisation of radical changes in strategy, with the support for Metro/tablet computing, and cloud services.
As with OpenOffice, Lotus (now IBM) SmartSuite and Google Docs, Microsoft is probably not overly concerned about free (or any) alternatives to its Office suite. But the cloud reach of Google's applications is more challenging, and that is where Office 365, combined with Microsoft's rapidly expanding portfolio of collaboration/sharing/communication tools, squarely attacks Google Docs and Drive.
Microsoft is betting again, as it has successfully for years, that the combination of more comprehensive features plus user familiarity (with the brand, if not the experience) will keep customers loyal.
Office 2013 will only run on Windows 7 and later. There's no Mac version in the preview, but one is expected at the time of launch. The preview is available in a handful of variations aimed at consumers (using SkyDrive) and enterprises (using SharePoint and Lync), but the retail versions may be very different. No information of pricing is available yet.
Using the Office 2013 preview, a few development directions were immediately obvious:
1. Cloud
Office 2013 is designed to live in the cloud, and Microsoft is unsubtly pushing customers in that direction. Consumers are nudged towards SkyDrive, enterprises towards SharePoint, and all of them towards Office 365, the online suite. The value proposition is undeniable: universal access to your applications and documents, with collaboration, sharing, and communication tools enabled.
In Office 2013, applications default to saving documents into cloud folders, and numerous connected features reinforce the online play, such as weather widgets and social media integration in Outlook, and sharing and collaboration features across the board. I'll discuss these in a little more detail further down.
Web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote offer view and limited edit capabilities in a Web browser, with good support for non-IE, which will also extend options to non-Windows tablet users. I successfully tested the Web App versions with Google Chrome on both a desktop PC and an Android tablet.
Customers are spoiled for choice in communication options - Microsoft now has an embarrassment of communication and collaboration tools. A big question will be how these tools are integrated, and how a unified service will take shape for customers. Skype, Yammer, and Lync all offer communications, often overlapping in function, and stand to benefit from integration into SharePoint, Live and Office 365, which are also being gradually melded together. Office 2013 taps into many of these products, but there's still a lot of room for progress in unifying them beyond the existing Live and SharePoint platforms.
2. Designed for tablets and Web
Office 2013 has been completely overhauled with a new Metro UI, designed to mesh with the new look and feel of the upcoming Windows 8, and to work well across PCs, tablets and browsers. The ribbon, still controversial after all this time, is now flat, almost completely black and white, and the icons are more widely spaced. Menus are all caps, which looks a little odd on a PC, but makes for clearer identification in a Web browser or space-constrained display. The spacing makes touch controls a little easier, though early tests have included many complaints that small icons on the ribbon are hard to use on tablets. OneNote MX, a native Metro app, has a radial menu which is more tablet-friendly.
Dialogue boxes, such as options and save interfaces, have been completely revised with Metro and tablets in mind, with larger, clearer buttons and text as well as the ubiquitous SkyDrive cloud integration.
For the most part, the flat Metro look is very effective. In Outlook, it is a bit harder to swallow - the flat, colourless interface makes it difficult to distinguish between the different information panes. And with the Folder, Task, Preview and People panes all open, the inbox view is frenetic and confusing, with actual e-mail content consigned to a small window mostly filled with header data. That's a shame, because Outlook's information panes have been enhanced with a lot of useful data, but there just isn't room for it all, and Metro isn't helping.
3. Productivity
Each component of Office 2013 has been updated with numerous new features focusing on productivity. All of the apps have been improved - the list of updates is lengthy - so I'll just pick out some highlights which caught my eye, and leave the full details for a more comprehensive review.
Outlook has been extensively updated, with Xobni-style integration for social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn at launch) in the People pane, which pulls together Outlook's data (e-mail threads, meetings, and so on) with contact details, statuses and messages from social networks. The message pane now allows inline replying directly in the pane, a clear nod to tablet interfaces, though pop-up message windows are still an option - the inline reply space is very cramped, even of a good-size screen. Some features are merely cute - a weather widget adds daily forecasts (for multiple cities - handy for travelling) to the Outlook calendar, for example. Better support for Internet calendars and mail services is also good, but I still miss the ability to show multiple calendars overlaid, rather than side by side.
Excel has received a lot of data analysis tools updates, including a very slick Quick Analysis Lens, which identifies patterns in data and provides suggested manipulations based on that. Graphing has been updated too, with more intuitive suggestions for types of visualisation.
Word has some editing updates, and a neat reading view which allows the user to more easily page through a document and collapse the text that has been read, recognising that reading long documents is a specific task needing dedicated features.
Word also has the ability to not only export PDF documents, but to open them and edit them directly. That sounds fantastic, but in practice it fails almost completely - even quite simple PDFs were opened in a mangled state, which was dutifully saved back to disk later. Editing PDFs is notoriously difficult - it would be truly impressive if Microsoft cracked it, but it hasn't, and might have done better just leaving the feature out for now.
Rough edges
The consumer preview is not the finished product, so some bugs can be expected. From the start, Office 2013 was decidedly slower and less responsive than Office 2010. I also experienced consistent upload errors while editing documents in a connected PC's SkyDrive folder, resulting in a barrage of pop-ups and status alerts.
Although most of the apps look great, the Outlook interface is not a comfortable fit with the Metro overhaul at all. Expect to do some customisation to make it work for you.
I have no indication yet of when the suite will be available, what bundles will be available, and what pricing will be - something I'm watching for with interest because of the SaaS rental model becoming so central to Microsoft's strategy here.
Timing is also particularly interesting, because Office 2013 is not expected to ship before Windows 8 (due in October 2012), meaning the promised bundle of Office with Windows 8 RT - the OS version for Arm tablets - will presumably not be Office 2013.
Microsoft may have been languishing strategically in recent years, but we're now seeing a massive overhaul across the board. Windows 8, Metro, Surface, Office, Windows Phone... these initiatives include the biggest revamp of the company's OS and productivity line - its cash engine - in years. The big question for Office is: will customers upgrade, and will they embrace the cloud according to Microsoft?
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