Hard to believe, but Microsoft Office 2013 has been
with us for over 3 years now. Yet it still seems like it was released just the
other day. While its overall rating and reception may not have been as overwhelming
as it has always been for its predecessors – 2007 and 2010, MS office 2013 does
come with a number of positives. We take a quick peek at the big four core
applications – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, seeing as Office 2016 is just
around the corner.
Cloud features
As part of its launch, MS Office reached a new
landmark by going into the cloud with subscription pricing, on-demand
installation and automatic synchronization of settings and documents you save
online rather than offline.
This pushes deep integration between its desktop
applications and your data, stored on Microsoft servers. It also implies that
as an end user, you are still able to use office wherever you go – on your PC,
your tablet and your Windows phone handset. It's called Office 365, and this method
of purchase ensures you are always up-to-date even if there are changes in the
software.
Design and navigation
A more subtle innovation is the use of animation that
makes normal transitions look more fluid (you can disable these effects if you
wish). Microsoft has made several routine operations easier to perform from
within the apps.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint no longer show a blank
page at launch. Instead, a landing screen presents templates and other options
for creating or re-opening a document – basically, that’s the screen you used
to get when you wanted to open an existing document or create a new one from a
template. This screen exposes ready-made design options that you might not
otherwise consider.
Word
One of MS Word’s most visible innovations is a new “Read
Mode” that does away with the ribbon toolbar and lets you view documents as
though they appeared within a printed book. In this mode, you can’t edit, but
you do have access to find and search tools. So you can perform lookups related
to highlighted content.
It also has more innovative sharing options beyond
SkyDrive. For instance, you can show your Word document to someone who isn’t
running Word by creating and availing to them a link to the same.
Excel
Excel comes with a small Quick Analysis button at the
bottom-right corner. You can click the button to view thumbnails of several graphs
and chart options, pick one and click to apply it. Not sure how best to massage
the data? Excel also offers buttons that generate chart and pivot table
recommendations. Oh, and it still does a measly 1,048,576 rows (Sad).
It also comes with additional features such as Flash
Fill feature, which can detect patterns (beyond the numerical and date patterns
Excel has long been able to recognize), and autocompletes empty fields as
appropriately as possible.
PowerPoint
MS PowerPoint has an extra formatting pane that
allows the user to make adjusting design elements simpler. Its enhanced media
support includes the ability to play more video formats. It also allows one to
have background audio play across your entire presentation.
Outlook
MS Outlook 2013 opens with a simple two-pane design
consisting of the list of messages and the selected message in the preview
pane. You can quickly respond to the message by clicking the Reply button in
the preview pane.
Also in this new-look Outlook is a new feature called
Mailtips. Mailtips brings possible issues to your attention, such as if you
fail to forward an attachment. This is quite handy for corporate environments
where IT sets restrictive email policies. Outlook will point out such potential
violations.
The Calendar view now includes a couple of days’
worth of weather information – wind, temperature and chances of rain. In this
feature, you can search for any city and it will bring the weather – though the
temperatures are annoyingly shown in Fahrenheit, to my chagrin. Oh, and of
course you have to be online to get this information.
There are reported changes and improvements in Publisher,
Note, Visio and several others. I did not see major changes in Visio though, save
for a few added templates. Most of them have pretty much the same new tools
available in the aforementioned office apps (Word, Excel et al).
On the whole, as seamless cloud integration appears
to have been Office 2013’s biggest plus and one may also say that most usability
tweaks are generally sensible.
The Cons
For the regular MS Office 2010 user, the improvements
aren't exactly mind-boggling.
1) The product appears to have been hurriedly put
onto the market. Since its official release, Office 2013 has had over 100 updates
released for the various components.
2) The product was strictly released is strictly for
Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems (Sorry Windows XP, Vista users).
3) Perhaps my biggest disappointment of all is the perpetual
eye-strain that is the trichromatic theme. While office offers different themes
– white, light gray and dark gray – they are all essentially the same. 3 (or
rather 50) shades of gray. Pathetic. Whoever did the design and final theme
vetting must have been colorblind.
4) As earlier said, Excel is still supporting only 1,048,576
rows. Granted, we know it is not supposed to be a primary data manipulation
interface and all, but an improvement certainly would not have done the users
any harm.
5) The meeting alerts in MS Outlook do not have open
options. I guess the end user is expected to go all the way to the calendar in
case they wish to see the meeting details. Double-clicking the reminder opens
the entire invite to show all the details though.
6) MS Picture viewer is gone, and has since been
replaced by Windows Live Photo Gallery. A little more complex than the old
picture viewer. The former was more convenient for fast actions like cropping and
editing, though the latter comes with more options.
7) The calendar no longer displays multiple calendar
months. With Office 2010, one could easily immediately see the preceding and
next month without having to click to move back or ahead. The MS Office 2013 Outlook
calendar only shows one month.
