The rumored release of Office 2013 became a reality today as CEO Steve Balmer lifted the veil on the latest version of Microsoft’s productivity suite at a special event held today in San Francisco.Microsoft has remained very secretive until this point and the public has finally gotten the chance to test out the latest version of Office which has been greatly inspired by the Metro UI on Windows 8 and Windows Phone.
The Office 2013 Suite includes: Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Excel which have all undergone several visual and performance improvements. You can download a Customer Preview of Office 2013 right now, by heading over to office.com/preview
PowerPoint seams to have undergone some of its biggest improvements to date with a new Presenter View which lets you current and upcoming sliders, total presentation time, and speaker notes.
Office 2013 also comes with great cloud integration with SkyDrive. SkyDrive keeps all your documents in sync. Once you have signed into Office 2013 with your Microsoft account, all your settings, recently used files, templates and dictionary entries will be available across all your devices. This will allow you to start a document on your desktop and continue working on it from your tablet or Windows Phone.
Office 2013 will also feature an updated cloud-based subscription service with Office 365. Subscribers will automatically receive future upgrades with access to integrated cloud services like Skype world minutes and additional SkyDrive storage. Skype subscribers will receive an added incentive of 60 minutes of Skype World minutes per month, which itself would be a great addition for anyone interested.
The Office 365 subscription packages will consist of Office 2013 Home Premium, Small Business Premium and ProPlus. Home Premium serves families and consumers, featuring 20GB of SkyDrive along with 60 minutes of Skype. Small Business Premium features industry standard email and shared calendars along with various tools for websites and HD web conferencing. ProPlus which is aimed at larger businesses will be the full blown suite which all the tools an enterprise would need.
Take a look at Office 2013 in action in the following video demo.
So make sure you enjoy the latest features of the Office 2013 Customer Preview which can be installed on Windows 7 or Windows 8. We would suggest you try it out on Windows 8 to get the maximum out of the new Suite.