Office for Touch may be the Office you’ve always wanted

Office for Touch may be the Office you’ve always wanted

Even though they are only Preview versions, Microsoft’s new Office for Windows 10 Touch applications are fast, clean-looking, and fun to use. After a day of working with them, I wouldn’t hesitate to use them for much of my regular work. In fact, after getting used to them, you may wonder why Microsoft didn’t ship a simplified version of Office sooner. After years of most users complaining about the over-whelming feature creep in Office for the Desktop, here finally is a stripped-down version that has only the features most of us need day-to-day.

The touch-friendly Office applications keep the basic user interface of Office 2013 — a high-level set of ribbon-based panels with a single-document interface for the editing area. However, Microsoft has thinned out the command structure quite a bit. Ironically, this comes after years of customers asking Microsoft for the ability to customize the ribbon for themselves and being ignored. The 10-12 different areas of the Ribbon have been reduced to six or seven. The ribbon panels have also been greatly simplified — just like Microsoft did with the touch-friendly version of OneNote — to a single line of options under each heading. All of the applications have “Fire, Home, Insert, Review, and View” command headings, with Word adding Layout, Excel adding Formulas, and PowerPoint adding Transitions and Slideshow. A small set of task icons, including Sharing and Feedback, also live off to the right of the command bar.

Finally: A use for the Ribbon!

In Touch, Microsoft’s often-maligned Ribbon interface has found a natural ally. When using a mouse, clicking back and forth between Ribbon panels to get to a command adds an extra step compared to using a set of drop-down menus. When using Touch, it feels quite natural to click on the desired panel, and then on the command.

PowerPoint’s new Ink Tools make me want to give a talk

Sometimes it is the little things that create loyalty. For veteran presenters, the Ink Tools available in PowerPoints Slideshow mode may be one of them. PowerPoint already lets you point & annotate slides when presenting, but the UI is a little tricky — especially in a dark room. Now there are simple pen, highlighter, and eraser tools you can operate with either your mouse or a stylus to annotate slides during a talk, without having to click through menus to get to them. The annotations are kept completely separate, are easy to erase, and don’t mess up your presentation. This is a great way to add some spontaneity to a presentation without too much extra effort. I can easily see having a Windows tablet (the Surface Pro 3 is pretty ideal in this case) nearly flat in front of me while I present. I can then illustrate my points by sketching on the screen. Ink isn’t a replacement for looking up at a projected screen with a laser pointer (it is a lot better if you are looking at the same image as the audience, rather than appearing to be some sort of Wizard of Oz behind the curtain), but for detailed annotations — or Webinars where no one can see you anyway — it will be very helpful.

Excel for Touch is cool, but is it enough?

Microsoft has done an excellent job of creating a touch-friendly spreadsheet with Excel Preview. It is pretty easy to select cells, rows, or columns with fingers or a stylus. Once you make a selection, handles pop-up to make it easy to manipulate. As with the other touch-friendly Office apps, the simplified ribbon is also easy to use. I was a little surprised to find that this version of Excel doesn’t run macros (at least those written in VBA). Perhaps that will be changed before the final release, but macros are such an important part of so many models that it will definitely limit its usefulness.

Some rough edges, but nothing insurmountable

As befits an initial preview there are some parts that don’t work right yet. The new apps get very confused when you shift your device in and out of Tablet Mode, for example. Presumably this is the sort of thing Microsoft will fix long before the final version is released. The integrated sharing using OneDrive is cool, but not all documents can be opened by the set of Office online tools. It would also be nice to see other Sharing options — like Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive. I also expect Microsoft will add back some of the commands from the full version of Office, based on feedback it receives from the Windows Insider community. By the time the Office applications for Touch are released, there is no reason they shouldn’t provide an excellent productivity suite — if your favorite commands are among those Microsoft decides to include.

Did Microsoft throw the baby out with the bath water?

As much as nearly everyone bemoans the complexity of the traditional version of Microsoft Office, using the new tools reminds me of using many of the more-simplistic tools against which it has long competed and won. Word for Touch seems a lot like a touch-enabled version of T/Maker from the 1990s, or a touch-friendly version of WordPress, for example. There isn’t anything wrong with that, and it is probably the product most of us would like to use for creating documents, but is Word for Touch still special enough to command customer loyalty without all of the advanced features Microsoft has packed into the Desktop version of Word over the years? Likewise, if this version of Excel won’t run macros, it risks being reduced to the level of one of the many available Excel clones.

Since Office for Touch is expected to be free for tablets and small laptops, its goal is to maintain Microsoft’s market share, not to create revenue directly. As with Office for Android and for iOS, this is a really-good, if a bit late, strategy. I have no doubt that it will be wildly popular with anyone using Windows on a touch-enabled device — and perhaps even for many who just want a simpler version of their desktop tools. It may also lure many Windows users back from Google Docs. Whether it will convince anyone to buy a Windows tablet instead of a competitor remains to be seen.

If you want to try out Microsoft’s Preview of Office for Touch (also called Office for Windows 10, or Office version 16), you need to be running the latest build of Windows 10 Technical Preview, and look for “Word Preview,” “Excel Preview,” and “PowerPoint Preview” in the Store (Beta) — the version of the Store with the gray icon, not the green one.