Office 2013

So, has anyone here got their hands on Office 2013 yet? If so, what do you think? Is it an imporvement, or is it not your style?

We just got it here at work, and I must say, it is...interesting. Certainly more visually appealing and I haven't found any performance issues as of yet (in fact, it is much faster and slicker in my subjective opinion) so yeah, it appears to be pretty good. The option to save directly in to your SkyDrive is also very appealing (and with 7GB of free storage, why wouldn't you!?!).

I don't like the fact they got rid of the picture editor...it was perfect for quickly editing and cropping pictures before sharing them with friends, but they removed it from the Office suite

I miss Office 2003, personally. I'm definitely not a fan of the minimalist/tablet interfaces and "ribbons" and whatnot that Microsoft has been pushing into their products over the past few years. I don't think "slick", I think "great, now I need to find where everything is again, and it's going to take more clicks".

The Ribbon I actually prefer using, it makes things easier and quicker after you got used to it.

From what I've read, aren't they meant to be turning it subscription based or are they just offering a cloud/subscription one?

I'll probably give it a preview though since my trial version of 2010 has ran out of rearms. Could've made it easier to grab the 64bit version of the trial program though.

EDIT: With the cloud features, whilst I understand it's meant to make things easier especially if you move computers quite alot, in Office itself not sure if it's a feature I want. Not entirely sure if I'll be able to install my copies of Visio 2007 alongside it though.

BTW thanks Microsoft for not giving me the option of where to install the bastard thing.

The UI has gone backwards. The layout is largely the same as 2010 but I don't like how they've styled it. There is less distinction between things.

quote Aurora

I haven't looked into it in great detail, harbin, but as far as I know, you can still buy Office 2013 separately, but you get it alongside (some?) Office 365 (that's the cloud service) subscriptions as well.

I've seen that installed alongside my copy, but I haven't figured out how to use it yet, or if it's just enabled automatically in the background or something. Don't know, but it's certainly installed on my system with the rest of the Office suite.

quote harbin

It gives you the option of signing in with your Outlook/Hotmail account so I assume you can save it to the Skydrive, download a local copy and a background service will sync them. From what I understand Office 365 is an online, cloud hoested one probably like Google Docs.

Ah ok, gotchya. In that case, looks like it is enabled automatically in the background. Just sign in with your Outlook account and BAM, all setup. Great functionality, potentially very awesome for the student (university or otherwise) that is moving around a lot, and it is all saved in the cloud.

I'd still rely on Google Docs more than anything. Office has a lot of great features, but its more than what I think most people need, especially if its a product and service you need to pay for.

How are you getting it for that price?

The $140 Office 2013 Home and Student version includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The $220 Home & Business edition adds Outlook, and the $400 Office 2013 Professional package throws in Publisher and Access. Not only are those prices a bit higher than for comparable versions of Office 2010, but they also cover just one installation--and Microsoft isn't going to offer discounted prices for multiple stand-alone installations. (Right now, for example, you can still get a three-license version of Home and Student 2010 for $150, or only $30 more than a single-license copy.)

Yeah, I grabbed the Professional Plus version for a nice $10, but sadly that deal has been over for a few days. The installer also works for installation on two PCs, not just one.

So far, it is pretty much exactly the same as Office 2010 in my eyes, just with caps lock ribbon titles and some nice animations. The overall aesthetic (other than caps lock ribbon titles) looks pretty nice to me.