Microsoft's 'New Office'

According to Microsoft, the new Office will be the first productivity suite that will provide a unified user experience across multiple platforms. As Ahuja put it, “Office will be available on the device you come from” and that “cloud and Office together create a unique value for our customers”. Apart from this, there is also a noticeable focus on social media in the new Office, with integrations built-in with Yammer,Facebook and LinkedIn. Finally, Ahuja also emphasized that a great level of control will be available in the new Office, allowing companies to “maintain the old Office and the new Office”, giving them flexibility in managing their infrastructure. We will now outline the most useful new features that have made it onto popular Office applications:

PowerPoint 2013

Microsoft has done some nifty stuff behind-the-scenes to make PowerPoint an easier tool for presenters to use. For example, with the Presenter View that is available, the presenter will have a seperate view that will include a preview of next slides as well as notes, but this screen will not be visible to the audience! Instead, the audience will only be able to see the slides. This means that presenters will be able to change the slide sequence and make notes behind curtains without interrupting the flow of the presentation.

Word 2013

Ever found it a pain to insert videos and pictures into a document in Microsoft Word? Well, leave your worries behind in Word 2013, which lets you insert media easily. It lets you search YouTube and other sources for live videos, which can then be embedded and viewed right from within Word itself! Ahuja also showed us the impressive text reflow feature, which aligns media and text in a clean and presentable manner. Also, say goodbye to PDF readers and editors. Word 2013 lets you view and edit PDF files directly, which will prove to be a critical feature for certain people.

Excel 2013

Excel definitely impressed us the most, as Ahuja showed us how dynamic the tool is becoming. With business intelligence becoming one of the main priorities of many companies, it is becoming critical that data can be translated into logical patterns in real-time. The new Excel helps make sense of data easy. During the demo, we selected a table of random data, and Excel immediately gave us options to generate live graphs of the data. When we changed data within the table, the live graphs also changed dynamically. Power View allows data to truly come to life, as interactive models can be built which can be drilled up and down in several ways.

Outlook 2013

While there is nothing exceptionally different about Outlook 2013, it does have a cool feature called “Peeks”, which brings up hovering menus as you mouse-over your Calendar or People labels in Outlook. Social media also rears its head in Outlook, as you will be able to connect to social news feeds of your contacts through connectors for Facebook and LinkedIn. While this does seem exciting, we do not think it would really help enterprise productivity in any way. What would help productivity though, is integration with SharePoint. Fortunately, Outlook maintains SharePoint groups so that documents can be viewed through Outlook itself, and the folder syncs with the team site.

A Step In The Right Direction

To highlight the best selling point of the new Office, Ahuja gave us a humorous anecdote. At the airport in Delhi, he happened to sit next to a young gentleman, who was casually surfing Facebook on his tablet. He then received a business call on his smartphone, at which point he had to clumsily whip out his laptop from his backpack to do a PowerPoint presentation. Ahuja pointed out that Office 2013 will become this man's best friend in future, because all he would need would be just one device. While Office 2013 is not anything revolutionary, it has evolved enough to excite new users but not too far as to alienate veteran users. The consumer preview is currently available to the public at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en . Please try it out yourself and let us know what your opinions are!