New Microsoft Office 2013 turn towards The Cloud

January 29th 2013, Microsoft (MS) released its new office version "Microsoft Office 2013". The most innovative aspect of this new version, is that Microsoft turns towards the new information technology (IT) trend, "the cloud". For instance, the applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others) can save files directly to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage service. Why changing towards the cloud? Maybe MS realized that some cloud services for storing and sharing files, such as Dropbox already have more than 100 million users.

Other major innovation is that it includes the possibility to add functions via an app store, following the trend introduced by tablets. For instance, some promising  plug-ins allow to include the ability to add Twitter functionality to the Outlook email tool and to consult Encyclopaedia Britannica articles from within Word. There are also 3rd party application that charge a fee, like the "task analyser" (from the firm sensei project solutions) designed to identify problems or missing information in users' documents.

Other new features include:

• Flatter look of the Ribbon interface and subtle animations when typing or selecting (Word and Excel)
• A new visualization for scheduled tasks in Microsoft Outlook.
• Remodeled start screen.
• New graphical options in Word.
• Objects such as images can be freely moved; they snap to boundaries such as paragraph edges, document margin and or column boundaries.
• Online picture support with content from Office.com, Bing.com and Flickr.
• Ability to return to the last viewed or edited location in Word and PowerPoint.
• New slide designs, animations and transitions in PowerPoint 2013.
• Support for Outlook.com and Hotmail.com in Outlook.
• Support for Skype and Yammer.
• Excel 2013 supports new limit models.

Some experts stated that this is a unexpected move that somehow introcues MS office into a marked dominated by other IT giant like Google or Apple

Suggested links:
MS Office preview
MS launches 2013 Office suite
Microsoft's Office 2013 is software for the cloud