Microsoft’s Office to get tablet touch in latest incarnation

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, introducing the new version of Office last week in San Francisco, said the new version is the company’s most ambitious yet.
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, introducing the new version of Office last week in San Francisco, said the new version is the company’s most ambitious yet.

— New versions of Microsoft’s word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail programs will sport touch-based controls and emphasize Internet storage to reflect an industry wide shift away from the company’s strengths in desktop and laptop computers.

The new offerings appear designed to help Microsoft retain an important source of revenue as more people access documents from mobile devices. The new Office suite also reflects the fact that people tend to work from multiple computers - perhaps a desktop in the office, a laptop at home and a tablet computer on a train and a smart phone at the doctor’s office.

Like the latest redesign of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, the new Office will respond to touch as well as commands delivered on a computer keyboard or mouse.

The addition of touch based controls will enable Office to extend its franchise into the rapidly growing tablet computer market. Apple dominates that market with the iPad, though Microsoft has plans to compete with its own tablet, called Surface.

The programs will store documents online through Microsoft’s SkyDrive service by default, meaning users will have to change settings to store documents on their own computers. The programs also will remember settings, including where the user last left off in a document, as locations are moved.

The Internet-based services approach is one Google has been promoting with its own suite of similar programs, threatening Microsoft’s dominance.

“This is the most ambitious release of Office that we have ever done,” Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said last week while announcing the new Office at an event in San Francisco.

A preview version of the new Office suite is being made available online at office.com/preview. Microsoft Corp. isn’t saying when it will go on sale or what the price will be. Those details will come in the fall.

The new version of Office includes plenty of new and promising features, said Mike Silver, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm. But he added that it may struggle to catch on.

Microsoft is planning to end its support for Windows XP, the still widely used 10-yearold version of the operating system, in less than two years, noted Silver. Organizations that are still running XP are largely focused on moving their computers and users off it, rather than worrying about upgrading to the latest version of Office, he said.

Spending time to evaluate the new version of the software suite “is time that a lot of organizations just don’t have,” said Silver. Office’s new features “may encourage them to upgrade, but it may not be right away,” he added.

Microsoft will continue selling the package as stand-alone software that can be installed on computers, but the company expects the bulk of users will opt for an Internet-based version, which comes with automatic updates for a recurring subscription fee.

Other features in the new Office are:

Inkling, which allows use of a stylus to write on a device’s screen. Handwritten notes are converted automatically to text.

Integration with Yammer, a social network for businesses, and with Skype, a video chat service. Microsoft agreed last month to buy Yammer for $1.2 billion, while Microsoft spent $8.5 billion to buy Skype last year.

Bing Maps will be part of the new Outlook e-mail program. If there’s an address in an e-mail, just tap on it to get directions.

A “reading” mode on Word will make it easier to read word processing documents on a tablet or e-reader. That mode will make the document look more like a book page. Video also can be embedded into Word documents, or share a document directly on Facebook.

Information for this article was contributed by Troy Wolverton of the San Jose Mercury News.

Business, Pages 19 on 07/23/2012

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