Office 2013 beta review: Microsoft (almost) nails it

Also useful is the new ability to lock a document into commenting mode. That way someone can't turn off tracking changes, and you'll always be able to see any edits made to a document.

There's also a somewhat useful new sharing tool similar to a feature that was introduced in PowerPoint 2010 (but was not available in Word 2010). You can now share a Word document online, even with people who don't have Word, as long as they have Internet access. Send a link, and they'll be able to see your document in their browser as you scroll through it.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint 2013 gets new features in three areas: creating slides, giving presentations and sharing presentations.

When you create a new presentation, you'll see visual representations of your available templates, which makes it much easier to get a sense of what your presentation will look like when finished. Word and Excel have a similar feature, but because those applications are less visually oriented than PowerPoint, the feature isn't as important for them.

The graphical Metro-like interface is particularly useful when creating a new presentation in PowerPoint.Click to view larger image.

One of the biggest problems many people (including me) have in creating presentations is finding suitable art to include. Microsoft has found a useful way to solve that problem. From directly inside PowerPoint 2013, you can search the Web for art (using Bing's image search function) and embed it in your presentations.

I found the process remarkably easy. On the Insert tab on the Ribbon, click Online Pictures and choose Bing Image Search; you'll see thumbnails of graphics that match the search. Choose which one to insert, and the picture downloads and embeds directly into the presentation. This feature is also available in Word and Excel, but once again I found it most useful for PowerPoint.

From inside PowerPoint you can search for images on the Web and embed them in your presentations.Click to view larger image.

In addition to using Bing image search to find graphics to embed, you can search through clip art on Office.com, browse your SkyDrive or choose an option called "Also insert from." According to Microsoft, this last option will allow you to embed pictures from your Flickr and Facebook online photo albums, but I was unable to do that.

To do it, you have to agree to connect your Microsoft ID with those services. If you don't, you won't be able to search for graphics and insert them. I was unable to sign into Flickr to search my albums -- my Yahoo ID kept getting turned down. And I couldn't find any place in PowerPoint to search through Facebook. So I'll have to test this feature out with the next release.

For those who give presentations rather than just email them, the improved Presenter View will be a welcome addition. While giving a presentation, you see a navigational grid showing all slides at a glance so that you can easily jump to any in the presentation. The audience sees only the current slide you're presenting. There's also a new zoom feature that lets you zoom into and out of diagrams, charts and graphics while giving a presentation.

There are also new ways to share and work with others on presentations, including a comments pane that lets you immediately see all comments others have made.

Excel

The changes made to Excel in this version of Office are centered primarily around new analysis tools aimed at both spreadsheet jockeys and those who use Excel only occasionally.

Occasional users will find the new Quick Analysis tool to be one of the best new Excel features in some time. Highlight data that you've input into a spreadsheet and a small icon appears next to it. Click the icon and Excel offers suggestions, based on the data, about what you might want to do with it -- for example, formatting it in a certain way, creating specific types of charts, inserting formulas, creating tables or creating Sparklines -- mini charts embedded in single cells.

Excel's Quick Analysis feature offers suggestions on how to handle data, including choosing the right charts, formatting options, formulas you might want to insert and more. Click to view larger image.

Similarly, if you aren't particularly familiar with pivot tables (tables that auto-summarize data and display the results in a tablet) but want to create them, Excel gives you help by suggesting the proper pivot table to use. Even experienced users will welcome the Quick Analysis tool, because it cuts out the intermediate steps of manually choosing the right options for creating charts or tables.

Those who use the Office Professional Plus version of Excel 2013 will also get extra features aimed primarily at power users. A particularly useful one is an add-in called Spreadsheet Inquire & Compare that examines spreadsheets and looks for problems such as errors you've made or broken links. Microsoft also says that the add-in can look at multiple related workbooks and see if there are any inconsistencies that might indicate that fraud is being committed, although I didn't get a chance to test that out.

Outlook

The new version of Outlook offers only moderate changes from the previous version of Outlook, which made a big splash with its full-blown use of the Ribbon. The changes in this version are useful, although not nearly as significant as that.

The Navigation pane has been streamlined so that it takes up less space, giving you more screen real estate for the rest of Outlook; in fact, it's so much smaller that Microsoft has renamed it the Navigation bar. As with other Office 2013 apps, the overall design is Metro-like, and you can easily go into full-screen mode to hide the Ribbon.

Those who use SharePoint and Exchange can create special email folders for team projects and give everyone on a team access to them. These folders can include not just mail, but also calendars and task lists.

Searching has been improved considerably. You can now search across all folders and mail accounts in a single search, rather than having to search folder by folder or mailbox by mailbox. It's another example of a small change being a big productivity booster; given how often I search through my mail, it'll probably be the most significant addition to Outlook for me.

There's also a useful new "peek" feature embedded in the Navigation bar. When you're reading mail, hover your mouse over what you want to peek at -- for example, your calendar that day -- and a thumbnail of your schedule appears, large enough to read, but not so large that it obscures the entire screen.

The "peek" feature lets you see thumbnails of other Outlook activities when reading mail.Click to view larger image.

Other Office apps

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