Office ‘13 Fit for work?

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The Office 2013 Preview has been out a while, and I’ve spent over a month with it, so here’s what I think about it. I’ve only used Word, PowerPoint and Excel, because these are the only Office programmes I ever need to use.

The first thing you’re going to notice about the 2013 Preview software is the interface. If you’ve used Microsoft’s outlook.com, then you’d have a fairly good impression of what Microsoft’s new design philosophy looks like, i.e. flat.
While Office 2010 looked really good I can’t help but think that Office 2013 looks a bit too unprofessional. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it still sticks out to me as different, even after working with it for so long. The initial fallout of this is slight confusion on where stuff is likely to be, since there’s no menu bar; only the Office ribbon exists. Then the Office orb is gone too, replaced by a highlighted File tab. There are other changes too, like to the colour scheme: Word is blue and white, PowerPoint is red and white, and Excel is green and white. And those are mostly the only two colours used in the respective programs. It only takes about two to three minutes to get reoriented, however, so it’s not a big deal.
The UI now has hardware accelerated graphics, which means that it uses the GPU instead of the CPU to render the interface. Probably as a result of that they’ve been able to add a lot of nice subtle animations here and there, which are a definite plus point.
Functionally, it’s pretty much the same as Office 2010, except they’ve improved PowerPoint’s Presenter View, and Excel now allows you to quickly tabulate and graph data via popups (that don’t break the flow). There’s also a ‘touch mode’ that increases the area around buttons. There are a handful of other subtle differences, and you should try it out, as there mostly positive.
There were a few problems that I found, though. Word shows a very high CPU utilisation when receiving continuous input, which while hardly a problem on my desktop PC, has been a significant issue for Windows 8/RT tablets. Word also has a problem with opening very large (50MB) text files, which notepad did manage to open after some time, but Word couldn’t manage properly. Excel also occasionally has trouble processing a large data set, after which only a reboot is able to stop it from crashing. Then animations in PowerPoint don’t seem to work in the regular slide show mode, I could only get them to work in presenter view.
The biggest issue I have with Office 2013 is the aggressive SkyDrive integration, to the extent that you have to explicitly go to the ‘settings’ window to change the default save location to your own computer. It also tends to behave badly if you click on a web-dependent service when you’re not connected to the internet.
Still, I’m willing to overlook the problems, since this is the “preview” after all, and I’m sure MS will make changes, I just hope they’re positive changes.