Microsoft says it’s the “most
ambitious release” yet. Simon jones has said what’s wrong with it in previous
columns, now here’s what’s good…
In Office 2013, Word, PowerPoint and Excel
all allow you to present your documents online to others, either via Lync
Server or Office 365, or via Microsoft’s free Office Presentation Service (Word
and PowerPoint only). This enables you to talk someone through a document
remotely – optionally allowing them to take a copy without sending the whole
document by email, which can be useful when discussing a finished or draft
document. You can’t edit the document while presenting it, but you can pause
the presentation, make a change and then resume presenting. If you need a more
collaborative experience then you can save your document to SharePoint or
SkyDrive and invite the parties at the other end to edit it with you.
In
Office 2013, Word, PowerPoint and Excel all allow you to present your documents
online to others
Word likes
Images in Word show a new Layout Options
tag that enables you to quickly set word-wrapping and anchoring options without
having to switch to the Picture Tools | Format tab on the ribbon. In Word and
PowerPoint, there are new magnetic alignment guides for images: when you move
and resize an image on a page or slide, it will display dotted lines whenever
it approaches various boundaries, such as the page margins, the center of the
page or other objects, and the image will then snap to this guideline, which
makes lining up images far easier than guessing or having to turn on a
background grid or marking. If you hold down the Alt key, the image you’re
dragging will not snap to the guidelines, which allows you to drag it
accurately close to the guidelines before releasing Alt. On the other hand,
holding down the Shift key while dragging increase the alacrity with which the
image snaps to the guidelines.
Easy
arrange images in Word with magnetic guidelines and layout options
Word’s read mode has been improved with new
options to view comments and the navigator, and the ability to zoom in on
illustrations such as embedded charts. While you’re reviewing a document you
can type comments, and other people can reply to such a comment, simply by
clicking on it – their reply is then kept in line with the original comment, so
that they never become separated and you always see the order of the replies.
You can also mark a comment or reply as “Done” once you’ve read or actioned it,
which fades it to a light grey color and shrinks it to a single line (this
preserves the history of the document much better than deleting the comment).
Also good for preserving the history of a document is the new ability to lock
on Tracked Changes with a password – all changes are then tracked and only
people who know the password can accept or reject changes, or turn off Tracked
Changes.
Excel likes
Excel’s
Quick Analysis has a lot of grey text, but everything is clickable except the
help text at the bottom
When you insert a chart in Excel, either
from Insert | Charts or the Quick Analysis tag that pops up next to the
selected range, you’ll now see a live preview of your data in the selected
chart type as you hover over the different types of chart. This enables you to
pick the right chart type for your data without having to select one and then
change your mind. Getting it right first time may save you only a few seconds
each time, but it encourages you to experiment.
Formatting a chart is now easier, with tags
next to the chart and the new Formatting task pane for controlling all the
options, rather than the modeless dialog that was employed in Excel 2007 and
2010. One thing that you have to remember when using the Formatting task pane
and the Quick Analysis tag is that they’re effectively tabbed dialogs and that
all their text and icons can be clicked on, even if they don’t look like
buttons. The current tab is shown in green and other tabs you can click are
grey. Yes, I do know that greyed-out text is usually reserved for indicating
that something is disabled, or possibly an explanatory comment, but here
virtually everything can be clicked.
Outlook likes
One
nice touch is that the current message gets a Draft tag in the list
Outlook 2013’s Inline Reply feature works
well, but it has limitations. Typing a reply to an email open in the reading
pane happens inside the reading pane, showing a new Compose Tools | Message tab
on the ribbon of the most-used commands. This helps to reduce the proliferation
of windows in Outlook, but it doesn’t go all the way – it doesn’t work with
Quick Steps, which always pop up another window, and the tools available while
composing an inline reply are limited. You can’t, for instance, insert or format
a table, picture or Smart Art. However, one nice touch is that the current
message gets a Draft tag in the list and you can leave the message you’re
composing to look at information in another message and then return straight to
your draft reply just by reselecting the message to which you were replying.
We’ll have to hope that Microsoft will extend the functions available while
using Inline Replies in the next version.
OneNote likes
You
can insert Visio diagrams and Excel workbooks into OneNote notebooks
OneNote has been one of my favorite Office
applications since it was first released with Office 2003. There aren’t many
new features in OneNote for Office 2013, but the ones I like are the addition
of simpler table formatting and the ability to embed Excel and Visio documents.
OneNote’s tables are easy to use: either insert a table of n rows by m columns,
just as you’d do in Word – click Insert | Table, drag to the size you press
Enter at the end of the row. That defines the first row of cells, and you type
the rest of your data, pressing Tab after each cell. Pressing Enter twice in
the last cell notifies OneNote that you want to stop the table here. In OneNote
2013, you can apply shading to a range of cells, hide the cell borders, mark a
row as a header row, and sort the data in a table (ignoring the header row).
This removes the need to either manually sort data that was entered out of
sequence, or else copy it into Word, sort it and copy it back, which was often
the quickest and most accurate way of doing this previously.
Embedding Excel workbooks and Visio
drawings into OneNote pages gives you more flexibility than using OneNote’s
simple table, maths and drawing features, and you can either embed an existing
workbook or drawing features, and you can either embed an existing workbook or
drawing, or start a new one.
