At the Windows 10 announcement there was also a glimpse at the next Office – the long-promised touch screen version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
The overall concept is that the ‘same’ Office programs will act similarly whether you’re on a Windows 10 phone, tablet and PC’s. How that works in practice, only time will tell. There are plenty of unknowns still to be revealed by Microsoft.
Windows 10 will come with a separate suite of Windows 10 and properly touch capable versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs plus some apps which have Outlook like features.
The current ‘Win32’ (Microsoft’s term) Office software will continue and be the most comprehensive and feature rich versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The next version of the Office suite will be called Office 2016 and is due out in the second half of 2015.
Word on a Windows 10 phone has an ‘app bar’ at the bottom of the small screen which mimics the ribbon features of ‘grown up’ Word.
These, admittedly poor, shots are taken from the latest Microsoft presentation about Windows 10.
Microsoft showed what they called a sophisticated document in the Word app on a Windows 10 phone. There is a Print Layout and a Reflow mode, the latter designed to show all the content on the small, narrow screen. Of course, Microsoft’s sample documents are always created to avoid anything that doesn’t look good on the new program.
There was a carefully worded phrasing saying that the Windows 10 Word app would have a ‘nearly no compromises experience’ which is a nice touch of honesty.
There was no Excel demo, apparently for lack of time. Wireless Printing support was promised,
There’s a menu which has the equivalent of the ribbon tabs. Here’s PowerPoint for Windows 10 with options to switch between Home, Insert, Transitions, Slide show, Review and View app bars.
And here’s the Word for Windows 10 menu and app bar on a phone.
A brief and doubtless carefully selected slide show was displayed with some impressive looking transitions and animations from PowerPoint for Windows 10.
The Recent Documents menu looks much the same as Office 2010 or Office 2013.
The recent documents list was shown following you between phone, tablet and PC. The Recent Documents list is saved to your Microsoft account and synced between devices.
Of course there was plenty we didn’t see. The demonstration was carefully choreographed right down to camera cut-aways from the demo screen when it suits Microsoft. There’s no opportunity yet for independent hands-on trials.
Office 10 for phones and tablets
If you buy a Windows 10 phone or small tablets it will include what amounts to ‘Office for Windows 10’. That will include an Outlook-like app as the default email client, a calendar app plus Windows 10/ Touch versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Plus People, Music, Maps and Photos universal apps.
‘Small tablets’ appears to mean anything 8″ screen or less.
There will continue to be a ‘full’ Windows version of Outlook with more features, available for PC’s running Windows.
Outlook
Outlook is gaining more variants which will add to the ongoing confusion over the name ‘Outlook’ and what software someone is talking about.
As we mentioned above, there will be a basic Outlook mail app that comes with Windows 10 small tablets and phones. There’s also an ‘Outlook’ calendar app in the same bundle
Here’s the slimmed down ‘Outlook’ for Windows 10 running on a tablet (left) and phone (right). Microsoft says it’s the same universal app running on different screen sizes.
There’s a left/right swipe method of going through your Inbox. A right swipe will delete the message (which is already possible in some programs) while a left swipe will Flag the message.
Microsoft showed off using Word as the email editor in the new Outlook app like it was some noteworthy innovation. As most Outlook users know, Word has been the email editing engine for many years. It would have been amazing if the new Outlook did NOT use Word.
