Nonetheless, Microsoft has made some subtle changes to the UI, and they're all quite important. The Ribbon is, indeed, still the cornerstone of the Office experience, the visual metaphor permeating Word, Excel, Outlook and every other application in the suite. Overviewįor those of you who thought Microsoft would completely overhaul Office ahead of the Windows 8 release, let's put it this way: if you could survive the transition to Ribbon menus in Office 2007, you'll quickly feel at home here. So join us past the break where we'll give you a detailed breakdown of what's new, along with screenshots and detailed first impressions. Fortunately for you, curious power users, we've been spending the better part of a week testing the software on a Samsung Series 7 Slate loaded up with Windows 8. Of course, Microsoft included plenty of granular updates like PDF editing and a behind-the-scenes Presenter View in PowerPoint. In Word and PowerPoint, you'll also find a read-only mode that turns documents into full-screen editions, whose pages you can swipe through as you would an e-book or digital magazine. (It's telling, we think, that files now save to the cloud by default.) As you'd expect, too, this version is also more tablet-friendly than editions past, with a touch mode that widens the spacing between onscreen objects and flattens menus. Once you sign up, you can download the various desktop apps to a certain number of devices and, as with Windows 8, your settings, SkyDrive files and even the place where you left off in a document will follow you from device to device. With this version, the company is moving to a subscription-based model wherein your Office files are tied to your Microsoft ID. Perhaps the biggest news isn't any single feature Microsoft's added to Word (hello, easy YouTube embeds!), but how and where you'll access your files. Today, Redmond unveiled the latest edition - Office 2013 (aka Office 15) - which the company will be showing in a preview stage until the final version goes on sale (hit up the source link if you want to download it for yourself).

It's been about three years since Microsoft unveiled a new version of Office, and particularly with Windows 8 just months away from dropping, the software has been well overdue for an upgrade. Office Next blog is here to answer all your burning questions about the future of spreadsheets.Microsoft Office 15 leaks suggest Office 2013 name, show off Metro logo and Web Apps UI.Microsoft begins Office 15 technical preview, fills up before you knew it existed.

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