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Office 15 preview is out

by on17 July 2012



Different typing experience, Metro-esque eye candy


Office 15 has just gone live, at least in its Preview iteration. You can download the preview for free as of today and install it on up to five computers you own.

It’s a redesign of Office 2010 that many are still using today and the general look and feel is not that far away from Office 2010. However, there are some nice Metro-esque touches and many are telling that this will be the general look and feel of Office for tablets as well.

office15b

It’s a refreshing change, but if you got used to Office 2007 or 2010 you won’t have many problems getting used to the new UI. The absence of Aero glass support is definitely something that caught our eye, but there are a few new features to talk about. A blue Metro-like status bar tells you what page you are on, how many words you’ve typed so far, language, page layout and zoom, so it pretty much covers all the basics in one nicely designed spot. 

You can save documents on your computer or in the cloud via SkyDrive. We have been saving articles to Dropbox for a while now with Office 2010 and this doesn’t come as a surprise for the new iteration of Office. The Save dialogue is completely redesigned and refreshed. The typing animation is new and fun, at least until you get used to it. It’s different from any typing experience so far as it looks and feels smooth, but this subjective feeling is describe. You have to give it a go yourself to really see what we are on about.
 
Powerpoint, Excel as well as Outlook have been refreshed and I didn’t face any issues when it came time to load my 69,961 e-mail database. It looks somewhat pale compared to the previous iteration of Outlook, but the overall feeling is very similar.

office15outlook

Typing an email is very similar to Outlook 2010 but the new, smooth animation is there. Icons of all application are blue and in Outlook the calendar, people, tasks are now at the bottom. The notes, folders and shortcuts are hidden under a big three-dot menu, but they are still there. The calendar looks nice and generally there are not too many colors, keeping it clean and simple. It’s all done in blue and white, a color combination that will definitely look good under Windows 8.

It will be interesting to see how this new office compares to Office RT that is supposed to ship with Windows RT for ARM based processors.  If you want to give it a try, you can get it here.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

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