Office 15 Consumer Preview
This morning, we reached an important development milestone: the beginning of the "Office 15" Technical Preview Program. Office 15 is the codename for the next generation of the Microsoft Office products and services, and the Technical Preview is the first time we share our work with a select group of customers under non-disclosure agreements. These customers play a key role in our development process by testing early builds and providing feedback, which we incorporate into the final release.
At this early point in our development cycle, I'm not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.
While the Technical Preview program is already full, everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer, and we'll have more to share about the release then. In the meantime, I do want to thank everyone who is participating in the Technical Preview for their contributions and all our customers for their continued support.
The new features include:
At this early point in our development cycle, I'm not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.
While the Technical Preview program is already full, everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer, and we'll have more to share about the release then. In the meantime, I do want to thank everyone who is participating in the Technical Preview for their contributions and all our customers for their continued support.
The new features include:
- You can preview font changes before applying them, that is you can hover your mouse over "Times New Roman" and preview how your text would look like before clicking on it. New designs for cover pages, headers and footers and text formats help you make your document more creative. Online sync is a new feature added to Office 2013 and that is something which will compete with Google Docs. Your Office 15 is always synced with your Live ID and you can easily save apps to web and share them, at the press of a single click. A new navigation pane lets you know where you are in a document, can be useful when surfing through large documents. Another nice feature in the navigation pane is you can move text in the pane by selecting and dropping headings.
- The traditional Menu system has been replaced by Ribbon tabs which give the UI a nice look and are customizable and even can be grouped according to user's choice.
- Also Office has been customized to work well on tablets and smartphones and a brand new touch interface has been rolled out. Even an Office Next Blog has been launched which can as well be a forum to interact with the Developers of Office and also get blog posts about what new to expect.
- Support for Agave apps has been provided which makes browsing very cool and the new features include a dictionary and there has even been addition of reference applications such as Britannica with Office 15 and this really makes searching a fun and easy to do job!
- Excel has been modified to, you can put data on maps using your Excel file without the hassle plot it yourself. And the connectivity with various networks like LinkedIn, Windows Live makes mailing an easier task by providing in built options. Also a new set of icons in the ribbon bar makes your life hassle free by providing all the Excel formulae in there for you, without any need to type them by yourself .