MICROSOFT launched its “customer preview” version of Office 2013 and a revamped Office 365, earlier this week at a media event in San Francisco, USA. The company’s next-generation office suite looks to be tightly focused on mobile devices, touchscreens, and the cloud.

Like Windows 8, both Office 2013 and its cloud-based cousin, Office 365, represent a significant departure from their predecessors. Microsoft has changed features and concords big and small in the revamped suite, with the stated goal of streamlining productivity and embracing mobility.
The now-familiar ribbon interface is carried over from the previous generation of Office, but you can hide it from view to maximize the screen’s real estate available on smaller displays. Each component of the suite–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and the rest — has received new features.
The new version of Office includes integration with online services such as Facebook, Flickr, SkyDrive, and YouTube.
The company is also opening its Office 365 Online-desktop subscription service to home users. If you sign up for Office 365 Home Premium, once it becomes available, you can install Office 2013 on up to five PCs, plus you get 60 minutes of Skype calling minutes and an extra 20GB of online SkyDrive storage. The Office 365 Home Premium bundle includes Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word 2013. Office 365 subscribers will also be able to use a feature called Office on Demand, which can “stream” a virtualized version of Office to a PC; when you’re finished working, the program disappears from the computer, but your files remain wherever you saved them.
The final version of Office 365 will also include Office for Mac. Yep! It’s getting bite of the apple too.
Office 2013 inventors intend to steer users of both versions toward its SkyDrive cloud-storage service by encouraging them to sign in with a Microsoft Live account. This will enable users to store their files in the cloud, where the files can sync with and be opened from virtually any platform that has Internet access.
The new offerings from Microsoft include Office 2013 and an updated version of Microsoft’s Web-based Office 365. Microsoft has also indicated that Windows RT tablets will come loaded with Office 2013 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Microsoft’s decision to abandon its tradition of maintaining almost perpetual backward compatibility — which it also did in the case of Internet Explorer 9 — continues: The new Office 2013 and Office 365 applications will work only with Windows 7 and Windows 8. I must remind you that Microsoft will not support windows XP after April 2014. So it’s time you start thinking about migrating to windows 7/8.
Now, here are a few things that are new in Office 2013. Normally, when you fire up Word, it just opens a blank document, but Word 2013 takes you to a landing page. The page is similar to what you’d see in Word 2010 if you start a new document from a template. In a pane on the right, it hosts various thumbnail images illustrating the different templates; and in a smaller pane on the left, it lets you select from recent Word documents, or open other existing files.
I’ve always liked the ribbon bar, and I’m glad to see Microsoft embracing it across virtually all of its products — but I realize that many users detest it. Word 2013 adopts a hybrid approach that should work for both parties. The ribbon bar exists, but an arrow on the far right allows you to collapse it so that it appears to be a simple menu of links across the top. When you click a link, though, Word opens the associated ribbon interface instead of an old-school drop-down menu.
Microsoft lets you know up front what the consequences of saving a file in a particular location might be. As you choose different locations — SkyDrive, your local computer, or another device — to save a file, a bulleted list pops up at the bottom of the Save As display to let you know whether the file will be available offline or from other devices, and whether it can be shared with others from the chosen storage location.
For the desktop, Office 2013 delivers a host of smart updates to Word, Outlook, and Excel. Windows 8 and the upcoming release of Microsoft Surface tablets and Windows Phone 8 smartphones also play huge roles in colouring Office 2013 with new features.
When I fired up Outlook 2013 for the first time, the first thing I noticed is that it’s cleaner. Microsoft has streamlined the process of shooting off a quick reply in Outlook 2013. Instead of clicking Reply to open up a new email, you can simply start typing and reply inline on the message itself.
We know that Microsoft Office 2013 emphasizes cloud integration with new Office 365 subscriptions for home users, a greater focus on touchscreens, and Office on Demand virtualization; but what about the things we don’t know? Microsoft is keeping quiet about several key issues, including pricing, release dates, and whether the software giant will be including Android and iOS devices in its Office 2013 rollout. Anyways, good things come to those who wait.