Features

Usability

Whether you create a text from scratch or use one of the many templates included, Microsoft Word will help you with a wide array of tools: tables, text formatting options, color schemes, support to insert images and clipart and more. Microsoft Word also includes a powerful spellchecker and tools to revise documents with marked text and personal notes. Support for video, however, is still missing.

Quality

In all, Microsoft Word proves to be an excellent tool for text processing, from a simple note to a complex report with images, graphs and tables.

Conclusion

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What's new in Office 2013?

Microsoft Office 2013 is by no means a revolutionary update to the venerable office suite but this is the first version of Microsoft Office that has good cloud integration and a touch-friendly interface.

SkyDrive will be the backbone of Microsoft Office 2013. Settings, documents, templates, and even custom user dictionaries will all be synced to the cloud so that you have a consistent Office experience on whatever device, wherever you are.

There are also new social features shown in Microsoft Office 2013 including automatic picture importing from services like Facebook and Flickr. Easier sharing also brings along easier collaboration. Users can now hold a multi-person video conference while editing a single document.

What you get inside Office 2013

PowerPoint 2013

PowerPoint will also feature full stylus support to make giving presentations easier. Users can annotate their slides instantly. There's also a great new feature where the presenter can have notes on his or her screen but only have the main slide open on the audience's screen.

Outlook 2013

One of the more impressive features that was built into Outlook 2013 is its ability to intelligently suggest events and appointments. Outlook will detect when someone wants to create an appointment by looking for locations, time, and specific keywords. This makes adding events to your calendar much easier.

Last but not least, Microsoft also announced powerful developer tools to create plugins for Outlook. They demoed a fully interactive Bing map within a body of an email, without having to jump into a browser.

Word 2013

OneNote 2013

Excel 2013

Installation issues

Installation of Microsoft Office 2013 can be a bit of a pain on Windows 7. The Office 2013 preview downloads as an image file, which will need to be burned to a disc or you'll need a drive virtualization tool like Daemon Tools to create and mount the image. Windows 8 users will not have to worry about this as the operating system includes a disc virtualization tool.

Compatibility concerns

Microsoft Office 2013 creates a nice ecosystem for those already using their office suite but it may not be enough to woo users from other services or applications that are free. Microsoft also announced that Microsoft Office 2013 will only be compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8. XP and Vista users will be left out in the cold.

Conclusion

While Microsoft Office 2013 received some nice updates, there was nothing revolutionary that was announced. Microsoft played the catch-up game with Microsoft Office 2013, giving its office suite many features its competitors like Google Drive and Apple Mail have had for a while.

Overall, Microsoft Office 2013 offers some huge improvements over its previous versions with great cloud and touch features but this may not be enough for it to say as the king of office suites.

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I tested both the Technical Preview and the Beta version released months ago, and happily I've found a bunch of new features and improvements in the final version. For starters, the Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business pack includes five apps, namely Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. If you need to test more Office apps, you can try Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus instead.

As regards appearance, all the Microsoft Office 2010 apps have been slightly modified. They still keep the "ribbon" interface – in a much clearer, almost minimalist style – but the Office button has been renamed to "File" and now shows a different pane. Not only does it include direct access to all document-related tasks, but also shows detailed information about the document you're currently working on.

Leaving changes aside, the truth is that Microsoft Office 2010 has pretty much the same features we already saw in the Technical Preview. The context menu in Word, for example, has been greatly improved and lets you see changes in real time as you browse through the different options. You can now add videos to your PowerPoint presentations, remove redundant messages from conversations in Outlook and insert small color charts inside cells in Excel spreadsheets. There are also tools to translate text, take and use screenshots, and apply special effects to the images you use in your documents. What's more, Microsoft Office 2010 now lets you save your documents on SkyDrive and share them online in just two clicks.

Regarding performance, Microsoft Office 2010 seems to be as fast and light on system resources as the Technical Preview. There's a significant improvement in the time the suite apps take to launch, and how they behave when working on your documents.

In all, Microsoft Office 2010 is an excellent productivity suite with great new features that make it easier and more comfortable to use, and also turn it into an even more professional solution for daily work tasks.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business lets you fully test the new, long-awaited version of the world's most popular productivity suite.

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With spreadsheet sharing, Microsoft Excel is the ideal way of sharing, managing and analyzing information. This version of Microsoft Excel has improved access across the board, from a cleaner interface to better usability. The ribbon-like interface caused controversy when it was first introduced, but it's much easier to navigate for beginners, since you can now see all the options instead of having them hidden away in menus.

That's not to say the application has become any simpler to learn to use. Microsoft Excel is still a bit intimidating for beginners, although luckily it comes with tons of templates that help users get a better handle on it. One of the best new features it comes with allows you to restore spreadsheets you've accidentally closed. Consequently, it's now much easier to correct mistaken actions. The graphs and graphics you can add to your tables are also much improved.

Sharing data is easy as well, since you can use the Microsoft Excel web app, which allows any invited people to view or edit your spreadsheets. There are even mobile versions so you can access your spreadsheets on the move.

Microsoft Excel sets the standard in spreadsheet software. It comes as part of Microsoft Office 2010, which also includes other leading apps such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. It is incredibly powerful, and while there is a lot to learn in order to get the most out of it, anyone will be able to produce very attractive presentations with the data they enter into Excel spreadsheets.

Microsoft Excel 2010 is essential for many people at work, and there isn't a better spreadsheet application available.

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I tested the Technical Preview released a few months ago, and happily I've found a bunch of new features and improvements in this beta. For starters, the Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus pack includes a bunch of apps for you to test: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, Communicator, SharePoint Workspace and Outlook with Business Contact Manager - unlike the Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business edition, which ony features five apps.

As regards appearance, all the Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus apps have been slightly modified. They still keep the ribbon interface – in a much clearer, almost minimalist style – but the Office button has been renamed to "File" and now shows a different pane. Not only does it include direct access to all document-related tasks, but also shows detailed information about the document you're currently working on.

Leaving changes aside, the truth is that Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus has pretty much the same features we already saw in the Technical Preview. The context menu in Word, for example, has been greatly improved and lets you see changes in real time as you browse through the different options. You can now add videos to your PowerPoint presentations, remove redundant messages from conversations in Outlook and insert small color charts inside cells in Excel spreadsheets. There are also tools to translate text, take and use screenshots, and apply special effects to the images you use in your documents. What's more, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus now lets you save your documents on SkyDrive and share them online in just two clicks.

Regarding performance, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus seems to be as fast and light on system resources as the Technical Preview. There's a significant improvement in the time the suite apps take to launch, and how they behave when working on your documents.

In all, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus is an excellent productivity suite with great new features that make it easier and more comfortable to use, and also turn it into an even more professional solution for daily work tasks.

Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus lets you fully test the new, long-awaited version of the world's most popular productivity suite.

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As with most of the other applications that come bundled in Microsoft Office 2013, Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 includes a redesigned welcome page that's actually useful. You are given a list of recently-opened files on the left as well as a grid of templates to get started. You can also search at the top for more templates if you don't see one to your liking. Clicking or tapping on a template will give you a window to choose a variation of it.

As with most new releases of PowerPoint, Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 includes a bunch of new themes, templates, and transitions. Microsoft also included some basic photo editing features. You can choose a filter for the photos you import into Microsoft PowerPoint 2013. These editing features are basic and feel a bit like an afterthought. You'll still want to use a program like Photoshop to do heavy photo modifications.

Speaking of photos, you can now import both photos and videos from the internet. Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 integrates with the services you've linked to your Microsoft account. You can pull in video from YouTube and photos from Facebook.

Formatting photos and arranging them has improved in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 as well. There are the new guides that are consistent across Microsoft's Office products. Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 is smart enough to show you how your graphics will be aligned with other graphics on the slide.

SkyDrive integration is in full effect in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 so you can pick up working on your presentation from any device that has SkyDrive linked. There's even a PowerPoint web application to do some basic edits. You'll still want to use a computer or tablet that has Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 to do serious work.

New to Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 is the 'Presentation View,' which throws up a handy prompter screen on setups with multiple monitors. There is an elapsed timer so you can help pace yourself and not run over a certain time. You can have notes on the side of your slides so you won't be tempted just to read off of the slide. This happens all unbeknownst to people in the audience.

PowerPoint 2013 has received many updates that make it easier to use and continues to be one of the best applications for making presentations. Be sure to check out our in-depth look at PowerPoint 2013's new features here.

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If you think that Microsoft Outlook 2013 would be getting some dramatic new features and improvements like the rest of the applications in the Office 2013 suite, you'd be wrong. For the most part, Microsoft Outlook 2013 remains much the same as the 2010 version. Here's what did change:

The entire app has a flattened look, which goes with the Windows 8 design language. The whole application is monochromatic, featuring lots of white and gray with the occasional blue accents. To me, this color scheme makes it hard to differentiate specific elements of the interface. There are no more icons and everything is text heavy. At the bottom, you'll find sections for mail, calendar, people, tasks and more. Gone are the buttons and icons, giving way to a minimalist text look.

There is a touch mode in Microsoft Outlook 2013, which brings up the same menus that it does in the other apps in Office 2013. There is a bar with frequently-used commands like reply, delete, move, flag and mark. This is great and gives Microsoft Outlook 2013 a good touch experience.

You can now pinch to zoom in the calendar to switch between day, week, and month views. If you are in any other section of Microsoft Outlook 2013 besides the calendar, you can now hover over the calendar section to bring up a pop up of the calendar and your tasks for the day. The calendar will also show weather information of your locale.

Microsoft Lync is still fully integrated into Microsoft Outlook 2013 so you can view a colleague's status and start an audio or video call right from within Microsoft Outlook 2013.

While the mail view is a bit difficult to read because of the monochromatic color scheme, Microsoft Outlook 2013's people view is much improved. Contacts will now pull in information from online sources like Facebook and Linkedin if you've tied these services with your Microsoft Account.

Microsoft Outlook 2013 will combine duplicate contacts, creating one contact card with consolidated information. If your contact has a picture, the picture will show up as a thumbnail next to the contact. It's strange that Microsoft didn't include this in the mail view of Microsoft Outlook 2013, which would help visually differentiate between different emails.

Even more baffling is the lack of threaded messages in Microsoft Outlook 2013. You'll still have to hunt for previous emails from a conversation. Oddly enough, Microsoft's own Mail app in Windows 8 and Windows RT features threaded messaging.

Another annoying change is Microsoft Outlook 2013's notifications. There's no way to dismiss them all in bulk so you'll be closing tons of alerts if Microsoft Outlook 2013 comes back online. Microsoft also got rid of the ability to act on an email from the notification, which was a very useful feature.

If you didn't like Outlook 2010, Microsoft Outlook 2013 won't win you over. While there are some useful new features, its bland interface and missing features make Office 2013 feel like an antiquated email client.

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Being the cheapest of all three editions, Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student is also the smallest one. It only includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote – unlike the Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business edition, with five apps, or the Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus pack, which features the full collection. However, these four apps are more than enough to complete school assignments and take care of household projects – such as creating and maintaining a domestic budget.

As regards appearance, the four apps in Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student keep the ribbon interface – in a clear, almost minimalist style – but the Office button has been renamed to "File" and now shows a different pane. It includes direct access to all document-related tasks, and also shows detailed information about the document you're currently working on.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student has pretty much the same features we saw in the Technical Preview, and in other Office editions as well. The context menu in Word, for example, has been greatly improved and lets you see changes in real time as you browse through the different options. You can now add videos to your PowerPoint presentations, and insert small color charts inside cells in Excel spreadsheets. There are also tools to translate text, take and use screenshots, and apply special effects to the images you use in your documents. What's more, Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student now lets you save your documents on SkyDrive and share them online in just two clicks.

Regarding performance, Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student seems to be quite fast and light on system resources. There's a significant improvement in the time the suite apps take to launch, and how they behave when working on your documents.

In all, Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student is an excellent productivity suite with great new features that makes it easier and more comfortable to use.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student lets you fully test the latest, long-awaited version of the world's most popular productivity suite.

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Well, the answer is yes. OpenOffice.org 3.0 reveals itself as a very decent competitor: it's light on resources, easy to use and offers full compatibility with standard document formats – including the latest .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and so on from the Microsoft Office suite.

OpenOffice.org includes six different apps that enable you to work with text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, vector-based graphics and mathematical formulas, respectively. All six apps are easily accessible from a launcher (the Start Centre) with freshly designed icons, as well as from the Quickstarter icon in the System Tray.

OpenOffice.org's applications met our expectations in every regard: they're easy to use (especially if you're used to working with Microsoft Office) and feature all the necessary tools to create complete documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and more. What’s more, there is a great selection of OpenOffice templates, which means that getting started will never be a problem. The program is also thoroughly documented.

We particularly liked the wizard-style interface in OpenOffice Impress (similar to PowerPoint), which enables you to create presentations in no time. But the best thing about OpenOffice.org is probably the possibility to improve and customize your suite with new templates and extensions, downloadable directly from the developer's site.

OpenOffice.org made a great impression. It's a very decent alternative to other suites and can be easily customized with new extensions. Definitely worth a try!

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Though it’s a special version for students, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic is not crippled in any way. It includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, SharePoint, Communicator and Publisher – a complete suite of apps to make your daily homework, assignments and papers much easier.

As regards appearance, all the programs in Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic keep the ribbon interface – in a clear, almost minimalist style – but the Office button now gives you access to a totally different panel. It includes direct access to all document-related tasks, and also shows detailed information about the document you're currently working on.

Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic has pretty much the same features we have seen in other versions of the suite. The context menu in Word, for example, has been greatly improved, and lets you see changes in real time as you browse through the different options. You can now add videos to your PowerPoint presentations, remove redundant messages from conversations in Outlook and insert small color charts inside Excel spreadsheets. There are also tools to translate text, take and use screenshots, and apply special effects to the images you use in your documents.

Regarding performance, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic seems to be fast and light on system resources. There's a significant improvement in the time the suite apps take to launch, and how they behave when working on your documents.

In all, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic is an excellent productivity suite with great new features that make it easier and more comfortable to use. Microsoft Office's innovations also turn it into an even more professional solution for daily homework and university papers.

Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Academic lets you fully test the new, long-awaited version of the world's most popular productivity suite.

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Excel has always been an immensely powerful application, if you know how to use it. Microsoft specifically targeted ease of use for Excel 2013. When users input data, Excel 2013 will analyze the type of data it is and will give suggestions about the best way to present the data. If the data is comprehensive enough, it will even analyze it and present an option to make a PivotTable automatically.

There is also a new feature called Flash Fill, which will help put badly formatted data into something comprehensible. Data will be sorted into the appropriate columns for you. This takes so much work out of manually organizing your data that Flash Fill may be the killer feature for those deciding whether to upgrade to Excel 2013.

One big improvement in Excel 2013 is how organic it feels. There are little, quick animations that mimic those found in Windows Phone 8, helping to make the program feel less clinical. The animations aren't distracting and help guide your focus to what Excel is currently doing.

The ribbon interface stays but has been tweaked to be more usable. Icons are different colors and grouped nicely. There is a new option in Excel 2013 to pull in pictures from the web from services that you've linked to your Microsoft account. Setting up Excel 2013 is automatic as it'll pull information from your account.

While Excel 2013 still has an intimidating amount of features, it has become smarter, making it easier to work with data. Microsoft has done an outstanding job with Excel 2013 and anyone who uses Excel on a daily basis should upgrade.

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In the same vein as other open source productivity suites like OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice boasts a comprehensive set of office management tools arguably on par with Microsoft Office itself. LibreOffice offers six different office management tools to meet your project management needs: Text Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, Database, and Formula.

Text Document is relatively synonymous with Microsoft Word, where Spreadsheet is like Excel. Presentation mirrors Microsoft's PowerPoint, and Database is similar to Access. Then you also have two additional programs in Drawing and Formula, which are an added bonus to the entire package. LibreOffice is compatible with Microsoft Office's document formats and also supports PDFs natively. It also has its own document format called Open Document.

Unfortunately, if you're unfamiliar with Microsoft Office products, this program might take a little additional time to get used to, particularly if you want to master some of its more advanced features. Regular Microsoft Office users will find LibreOffice's interface quite similar, however, and should pick up on how to use its various programs without too much difficulty.

A great alternative to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is a must-try for managing your various office projects.

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Well, the answer is yes. OpenOffice.org reveals itself as a very decent competitor, and this no-install, portable version is no exception: it's light on resources, easy to use and offers full compatibility with standard document formats – including the latest .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and so on from the Microsoft Office suite.

Portable OpenOffice.org includes six different apps that enable you to work with text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, vector-based graphics and mathematical formulas, respectively. All Portable OpenOffice.org apps are easily accessible from a launcher (the Start Centre) with freshly designed icons, as well as from the Quickstarter icon in the System Tray.

Portable OpenOffice.org's applications met our expectations in every regard: they're easy to use (especially if you're used to working with Microsoft Office) and feature all the necessary tools to create complete documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and more. What’s more, there is a great selection of OpenOffice templates, which means that getting started will never be a problem. The program is also thoroughly documented.

We particularly liked the wizard-style interface in OpenOffice Impress (similar to PowerPoint), which enables you to create presentations in no time. But the best thing about Portable OpenOffice.org is probably the possibility to improve and customize your suite with new templates and extensions, downloadable directly from the developer's site.

Portable OpenOffice.org made a great impression. It's a very decent alternative to other suites and can be easily customized with new extensions. Definitely worth a try!

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IBM Lotus Symphony offers three tools: word processor, spreadsheet and presentations. It's true that other productivity suites are usually more complete. However, IBM Lotus Symphony stands out for a convenient, single-windowed interface from which you can launch the three apps. Simply click on the "Open" button and select the kind of document you want to open: the program's toolbar will change accordingly. What's more, you can have as many opened documents as you want at the same time, no matter which type, and switch between them in the top tab bar.

The IBM Lotus Symphony suite includes all the basic tools that you could expect in such an application: spell checker and tables for documents, pre-designed templates for presentations and charts for spreadsheets - to name a few - besides the usual configuration options as regards fonts, colors and the like.

In my personal opinion, I'm glad to have another possibility like IBM Lotus Symphony to choose from when deciding which suite I'm going to use. A little rivalry is always good and usually produces better and wider options for computer users. And it seems IBM is beginning to take the suite competition quite seriously, as can be seen with IBM Lotus Symphony.

IBM Lotus Symphony has left the beta stage behind and now offers a stable, highly functional productivity suite that, despite not being as complete as other suites, may perfectly fit your needs.

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Kingsoft Office Suite offers a number of features for creating, viewing and editing personal and business documents. Kingsoft Office Free 2012 includes Kingsoft Writer, Kingsoft Presentation and Kingsoft Spreadsheets which correspond to all the major elements found in Microsoft Office i.e. Excel, Word and Powerpoint. Kingsoft Office Suite is suitable for both personal and professional use although the professional version offers further features that will satisfy the demands of business users.

Most importantly Kingsoft Office Suite is compatible with the latest Microsoft Office file formats and can easily open, read and write documents created with Microsoft Office as well as a wide variety of other formats. In addition, Microsoft Office can also open Kingsoft Office files so you can send and receive files between the two suites easily.

Built -in PDF Converter

Kingsoft Office Suite also includes a PDF converter that can save files including Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentations in PDF format. Alternatively, you can convert Kingsoft Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentations to PDF files.

Automatic spell check

Kingsoft Office Suite includes a built-in spell checker that works in real-time by marking the incorrect words in red when typing. It also includes a limited thesaurus which recommends words to help in improving your document.

Multiple document tabs

Kingsoft Office Suite also features tools for switching between multiple document windows using tabs. The tab bar that appears above the editing area allows you to switch between documents quickly and conveniently.

Lightweight

Kingsoft Office Suite is in a remarkably small package at just 70MB which is a fraction of the size of other office software. This means that it also installs remarkably quickly.

Document encryption

You can protect documents that you create in Kingsoft Office Suite with an encrypted password. Or you can set a document to be opened with a password in read-only format.

Overall Kingsoft Office Suite is a powerful office suite for anyone that wants a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office.

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