I installed Office 2013 on my Windows 8 Build slate PC on Monday night. Here are some early impressions:
- It’s very different looking. The layout has been optimized to make it touch friendly, but still appears to be mouse friendly.
- The new control that everyone is talking about reminds me of something in the Star Trek’s of the last 20 years.
- I really like where Word has gone. Becoming a consumer of information is a great idea. It is now also a reader, can scale the doc to your tastes, and can remember where you left off. That makes it very Kindle-like. It can also open and edit PDF. Bye-bye Adobe Reader; you and your constant patching requirements (that are usually not done) won’t be missed.
- As a person who writes the occasional white paper, I like how Word now allows flexible placement of images. Note that we never embed images when writing books; the editors do that in the later PDF stages.
- I love the new presenter view in PowerPoint. I’ve been dreaming of presenting from my slate PC in the past. I hate being tied to behind a podium when presenting and I don’t like looking back to the screen to remind me of what I’m talking about on this slide. Plus being able to use “ink” to highlight things will be useful.
- I haven’t looked into Lync or Outlook too much yet. I have them working with Office365 with no extra work other than signing in (as usual).
Don’t ask me about Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange servers. I haven’t a clue what’s new yet. To be honest, they are usually outside of my scope of work. There is a boat load of new documentation on download.microsoft.com for the “wave 15” betas of Office.