The latest Microsoft Office consumer
offering a top features detailed.
Welcome to your new office
Like Microsoft’s latest operating system,
Windows 8, the new Office suite of Office productivity apps taps heavily into
the cloud to deliver some of its most impressive new features. By leveraging
the cloud, you can access, edit, share, and collaborate on documents with
colleagues, family, and friends wherever you are – in the office, at home, or
on the go. And Office achieves that by storing Office documents on SkyDrive (or
SharePoint, for business users).
It is not just documents that you can store
on the cloud; the whole Office is on the cloud. When you sign in to your Microsoft
account, you will find settings, templates, and even the custom dictionary,
just the way you left them.
Like
Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 8, the new Office suite of Office
productivity apps taps heavily into the cloud to deliver some of its most
impressive new features.
The new Office is more touch friendly than
ever too, since It is designed from the start to work closely with touch- enabled
devices like tablets and smartphones. Because your documents and settings roam
with you, you can now easily create a Word document on your work PC, edit it on
your Windows Phone during the commute, and finish it off via Office Web Apps at
home. Regardless of the device you use, formatting and styles are preserved.
While the new Office runs well on a Windows
7 PC, you get the best experience when it is on a Windows 8 device. For one,
Windows 8 has support for a wide variety of input devices and inking tools?
Keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, stylus? You name it. With neat little touches
like suggestions when you mistype a word and keyboard layout that automatically
adjusts to the language you choose, Windows 8 rids many of the annoyances
associated with a touchscreen keyboard. All the new Office apps also have a
Touch Mode which spaces controls a bit further from one another so that it is
easier to hit the desired touch targets.
While
the new Office runs well on a Windows 7 PC, you get the best experience when it
is on a Windows 8 device.
Expectedly, to keep up with the new “Modern?”
Style interface that we now see in Windows 8, the new Office is also getting an
interface makeover. Across the board, we see a flatter and less cluttered user
interface, compared to previous versions of Office with their interplay of
colors and shadows. Indeed, by keeping the styling simple (or ‘less chrome? in
Microsoft’s own words), it allows users to focus better on the real tasks at
hand,
In the next few pages, we will answer some
of the most commonly asked questions about the new Office suite, and highlight
17 of our favorite new features in the four most used apps? Word, Excel, PowerPoint
and Outlook. But before that, let’s take a look at the standard system
requirements; they’re applicable whether you’re using a local or cloud-hosted
version of the new Office.
System Requirements for Office 2013
CPU: 1GHz or
faster x86- or x64- bit CPU with SSE2 instruction set
RAM: 1GB (32
bit); 2GB (64 bit)
HDD: 3GB
Display:
DirectX10 graphics card, 1024 x 576 resolution
OS: Windows
7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows Server 2012
Browser:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, 9, or 10; Mozilla Firefox 10.x; Apple Safari 5;
Foofle Chrome 17.x, or later
.NET:
Version 2.5, 4.0, or 4.5
Which office edition should I get?
The new Office comes in a number of
editions to suit individual, home, educational, and business needs. Office 2013
is your traditional desktop software with a perpetual license. With a Microsoft
account, you can still enjoy the conveniences of a cloud-connected Office, such
as online document storage and sharing. Office 365, on the other hand, offers
the new Office as a paid subscription service. Microsoft is also offering a new
Home Premium plan for families. This plan allows Office to be used on up to
five computers, and five mobile devices. Office 365 is also available in
business, education, and government editions.
For ARM-based devices that run Windows RT,
there’s Office Home & Student 2013 RT, which consists of Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, and OneNote. While it touts complete document compatibility, due to
security, and battery life considerations, certain features (support for
macros, add-ins, and features that rely on ActiveX) have to be omitted.
However, this edition of Office comes free - it comes pre-installed when you
buy a Windows RT device, such as the Samsung Ativ Tab.
Office
365 preview edition team site setup
Lastly, Microsoft-hosted versions of Office
server products such as Exchange, SharePoint, Project, and Lync are available
as part of Office 365 for businesses. They can be also be deployed on-premises,
or as a combination of both in a hybrid deployment.
Office 365 Home Premium
Suffice to say, you should choose an Office
package that best suits your needs. However, for home users, the $138 per year
Office 365 Home Premium subscription plan looks to be a very attractive
proposition. And this becomes even more so as Microsoft makes the licensing
terms of the locally installed, perpetually licensed versions of Office Home
& Student 2013, Office Home & Business 2013, Office Standard 2013, and
Office Professional 2013 tougher, and increases their prices by at least 10%
compared to their predecessors.
In addition to using Office (PC users get
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, and Publisher; Mac users
don’t have OneNote, Access, and Publisher) on up to five computers shared among
users in the household, Home Premium also lands the subscriber an additional
20GB of SkyDrive storage (you already have 7GB from your Microsoft account),
and 60 minutes worth of Skype talk time every month. Also, Office 365 is always
kept up to date automatically with the latest features and services; you even
get to reassign the five devices any time you want.
Also,
Office 365 is always kept up to date automatically with the latest features and
services; you even get to reassign the five devices any time you want.
Another great feature that only Office 365
subscribers get is Office on Demand. Need to run Excel on a friend’s Windows 7
or Windows 8 PC that doesn’t have the app installed? Just stream the
application over. When you close the app, it’ll be removed from the PC.
Office 365 Home Premium offers the best
value if you’ve a household of five. Consider this: Even if you were to
subscribe it for five years for $690, you still save more than getting five
copies of Office Home & Student 2013 for $945 (at $189 per copy). And
remember, you don’t get Outlook, Publisher, and Access in Office Home &
Student 2013, so it’s advantage to Office 365 if you use any of these apps.
Now, if you are currently a college or
university student, you’re eligible (after a verification process) for Office
365 University that’s available as a 4-year subscription.
