Microsoft is aiming its redesigned Office software at the growing number of people who expect their favourite applications to be at their fingertips, wherever there's an Internet connection.
In an effort to extend a lucrative franchise beyond personal computers, the world's biggest software maker is selling a retooled version of Office as an online subscription service to consumers for the first time. It's a departure from Microsoft's traditional advance of granting permission to install Office on solitary machines for a one-time fee
It feels like we've been talking about Office 2013 for a while now -- we first previewed the software back in July, and it's been available as a free beta download ever since. Today, though, it's launching in a more formal way: the final version of Office 2013 is now on sale, as is Office 365 Home Premium, which lets you purchase a subscription to Office 2013 and then install it on up to five computers.
The new Office largely adopts the look of last year's Windows 8, with a cleaner, more modern-looking design and includes touch screen capability.
The ribbons showing commands in Word and Excel are mainly unchanged. For the first time the package includes online calling and video service Skype, which Microsoft bought in 2011.
Users work can be stored in remote data centres - known as 'the cloud' - and the latest version of a document accessed from any licensed device with a browser that the user wants to work on
As for the apps themselves, they're accurately what they sound like, and that's a good thing. Bing News has a search bar into which you can type queries. Ditto for the dictionary app we tried, and LinguLab WordCloud. Web searches, definitions and everything else shows up in the same box where you performed the search so that you don't have to toggle over to IE 10 or any other program, for that matter. That alone makes these apps useful, though it helps that the details itself is clearly presented and comes from reliable sources.
The attempt to sell online Office subscription to consumers comes almost seven years after Google unveiled its own Internet bundle of word processing, spreadsheet and email programs. Google gives away a basic version of those applications, and charges subscriptions for more complicated packages aimed primarily at small businesses.
Microsoft's pronouncement to redesign Office into an online service makes sense, although it may acquire customers a while to embrace the concept, said Edward Jones analyst Josh Olson. He suspects major companies that rely on Office most likely will be among the last users to make the switch.
"This is a good improvement, but the uptake may be slow to begin because it is so different," Olson said
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