Gadgetory

well hey guys it's David at the virgin we're here looking at office 2013 which just released into public preview today for Windows 7 and Windows 8 there's a lot news so let's jump in now the first one is word which everyone's pretty much familiar with by now and not that much has actually changed you still get the ribbon but you can fortunately hide it now so you get a slightly better view of what you're looking at there's also a new full-screen mode which gives you kind of a distraction-free look and everything is technically able to be touched but it's not really optimized for it you still get a lot of small icons and things can be kind of hard to tap but it's you know it's there for touch if you really decide you want to write a word document using your fingers there are a few new features that actually do work for touch there's a reading view which lets you take whichever document you're looking at and basically lay it out like a book and then you can swipe through it it's nice for you know if you have a long document that you want to read without having one long scrolling page but other than that it's pretty much the word everyone has you know known and loved and it has you can edit PDFs now which is great you can just pull a PDF straight into Word and edit it there and then re-save it as a PDF you've always been able to do that but it's always been kind of a pain now it's much easier and there's some new layout tools if you want to add images or anything like that to your documents it's much much easier to do than it used to be next is Excel Excel has not changed much either it has a new start screen just like the rest of the other apps which gives you access to a bunch of different templates which lets you layout your documentary or chart however you want to and it's a lot more helpful in Excel than some other places because you're dealing with kind of complicated data sometimes but again it's very much the same as before you can hide or show the ribbon depending on how much screen real estate you want there are some new tools for visualizing your data but for input again it's not great for touch and it's still pretty keyboard and mouse driven it's a little cleaner and a little nicer to look at but really not that much different PowerPoint is one of the apps that actually benefits the most from touch since you might do a lot of presenting or flipping through slides it actually makes some sense to have enabled on a touchscreen device as you can see you get the same start screen as always you can easily open doc this goes for all of the word documents you can open docs from SkyDrive or on your computer or you get a quick look at whatever documents you've had open recently once you have a presentation ready actually presenting it is made a lot better in office 2013 you get a whole new look for your presentation where you can see notes and your slides and you can easily just tap from one to the next you can quickly change all kinds of settings and it's just a really nice way that actually makes sense with touch to show PowerPoint presentations you get some of the same layout tools when you're designing documents as before but again there's really nothing special other than that presentation mode outlook on the other hand did actually get some significant changes the look is now totally different you get it's a similar kind of three paned view but it almost feels like a metro app with a lot of swiping back and forth and it's much more touch enabled so if you have your hand on either side it's pretty easy to scroll through a message or navigate around it's just a much better app than we're used to from Outlook which has always been kind of cluttered and slow and clunky again the ribbon is here and you can hide it or show it I don't know why you would ever show it but it's here and one of the other cool things is called peeks you can easily see what you have on your calendar while you're in your email and it's actually a live preview so you can add things to your calendar straight from your email and it's just a nice way to have everything all in one view outlook is also now much better with Gmail it syncs with active sync I have a gmail account set up here and I used to be really slow sinking through IMAP but now it uses active sync so it will sync your calendar and your contacts and your mail all automatically and all really seamlessly it's also integrated with obviously the people app which is one of the big things on Windows 8 it will bring your contacts in and show all of their accounts across various different networks and it's just a really nice system for seeing people all in one place the last app there are a bunch here but the last interesting app is is OneNote and there's a desktop app for it now but there's also going to be a metro app styled just for Windows RT the desktop app looks just like it used to is again very simple and kind of redesigned to be much less cluttered this also works relatively well for touch you get the kind of right in the left rail and it's easy to type but as always it's very much a keyboard and mouse based system one notes always been a favorite of ours and it's a pretty good app here too as I mentioned though what's newest here is the strategy everything's connected through office 365 and SkyDrive and even the business model is different where you pay for a subscription rather than just buying the disk we're not sure on what pricing is going to be yet but we do know that when our T devices will come with office when they ships beginning in October overall office 2013 isn't a huge step forward yet but it's definitely moving in the right direction for Microsoft