Hasta La Gadget!

Break out the party streamers and balloons — if only in an orderly fashion, because this is the day Office 2013 has been released to manufacturing. The completion swings Microsoft’s attention towards a rollout staggered over the next few months. Wider availability will have to wait until the first quarter of 2013 — such synchronicity with your branding, Microsoft — but companies who’ve sprung for volume licensing will get access as early as mid-November to December 1st, depending on whether or not they’re embracing a Software Assurance plan. In the meantime, Microsoft is offering an easy path for anxious workers by promising a free copy of Office 2013 to everyone who buys Office 2010 from October 19th onwards. The upgraded software might not be cheap for those who aren’t already buying a Windows RT tablet, but it’s likely to be an important piece of the puzzle for anyone hunting down a touchscreen Windows 8 PC.

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Microsoft Office 2013 releases to manufacturing, reaches most of us early next year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you read our preview of Office 2013, you know we liked it. A lot. But if we had one reservation it’s that Office still isn’t that finger-friendly, even with the addition of a touch mode that widens the spacing between onscreen objects and flattens the menus so that you don’t have to tap quite as much. As if in response to critics like us (and readers too!) Microsoft has published a lengthy blog post detailing the thinking that went into the design of Office’s new touch-enabled features. Which is to say, it’s a more detailed recap of how the company’s engineers tweaked the desktop interface for touch, and designed some standalone apps that better match the Metro experience of Windows 8. At the very least, it’s a handy primer for folks who missed Steve Ballmer’s keynote and haven’t yet read up on radial menus or the Metro-styled OneNote MX app. Even if you have, though, it’s worth a read: Microsoft offers some interesting insight into the various scenarios where it imagined each touch-enabled app being used, and what kind of posture the user is likely to have, even. Whether that’s enough to prompt a change of heart is up to you, but it’s interesting nonetheless to get a little more color on how it all came together.

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Microsoft responds to critics, defends touch UI in Office 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been about three years since Microsoft unveiled a new version of Office, and particularly with Windows 8 just months away from dropping, the software has been well overdue for an upgrade. Today, Redmond unveiled the latest edition — Office 2013 (aka Office 15) — which the company will be showing in a preview stage until the final version goes on sale (hit up the source link if you want to download it for yourself).

Perhaps the biggest news isn’t any single feature Microsoft’s added to Word (hello, easy YouTube embeds!), but how and where you’ll access your files. With this version, the company is moving to a subscription-based model wherein your Office files are tied to your Microsoft ID. Once you sign up, you can download the various desktop apps to a certain number of devices and, as with Windows 8, your settings, SkyDrive files and even the place where you left off in a document will follow you from device to device. (It’s telling, we think, that files now save to the cloud by default.) As you’d expect, too, this version is also more tablet-friendly than editions past, with a touch mode that widens the spacing between onscreen objects and flattens menus. In Word and PowerPoint, you’ll also find a read-only mode that turns documents into full-screen editions, whose pages you can swipe through as you would an e-book or digital magazine.

Of course, Microsoft included plenty of granular updates like PDF editing and a behind-the-scenes Presenter View in PowerPoint. Fortunately for you, curious power users, we’ve been spending the better part of a week testing the software on a Samsung Series 7 Slate loaded up with Windows 8. So join us past the break where we’ll give you a detailed breakdown of what’s new, along with screenshots and detailed first impressions.

Continue reading Microsoft Office 2013 preview: details, screenshots and impressions

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Microsoft Office 2013 preview: details, screenshots and impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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