DACS General Meeting
August 2013
Meeting Review:
Microsoft Office 2013 and 365

By Richard Teasdale

Office is one of Microsoft's most important products. Used by millions of computer users around the world, it has been updated periodically and is today the dominant office software product on the market. The latest version, Office 2013, together with Office 365, were the main topics of Microsoft's presentation at the DACS August 2013 general meeting.

The presenters were Mike Walters and Nick Volant, both staff members at the Microsoft Store in the Danbury Mall. They were introduced to us by Carolyn Bighinatti, the Community Development Specialist at the store.

Mike began the meeting with an overview of Office 365.

Office 365 is a relatively new product, launched about 3 years ago. Two new versions were introduced in 2013:  Home Premium and the Small business version. Most of the evening's discussion was focused on the Home Premium version. (Information about other versions, including Enterprise editions, is at http://office.microsoft.com.)

There are three versions of the basic MS Office product:
(1) Home & Student: includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and One-Note.
(2) Home & Business: includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, One-Note, and Outlook.
(3) Professional: includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, One-Note, Outlook, Access, and Publisher.

Office 365 is a subscription program. Home Premium, which is priced at $99 / year, allows Office Professional to be installed and used on up to 5 machines for one year. After a year, the subscription has to be renewed. If not renewed, the software can still be used but reverts to read-only mode. The 5 users do not have to be all in the same household. The 5 "downloads" can be migrated between machines, i.e. one of the 5 instances can be removed from one machine and installed on another. Both PC and Mac versions of Office may be used. Users may even access Office as a web application from machines where it is not installed (so long as they are internet-connected).

Mike explained how an Office 365 subscription is potentially much more economical than the equivalent 5 individual licenses for Office Professional. 5 individual licenses would cost about $2,000. Assuming that the user can make full use of all the software in Office Professional, on all 5 machines, it would take many years of use before the equivalent Office 365 subscription would cease to be the less expensive option.

At this point the meeting digressed to a discussion of the relative merits of different versions of the Windows operating system. Mike mentioned that Office 365 requires Windows 7 or 8, and is not compatible with earlier versions of Windows. He also advocated some of the pluses of more recent versions, e.g. that Windows 7's start-up time is faster than that of Windows XP. Several members of the audience took issue with the implication that more recent versions of Windows are better than earlier ones, particularly Windows XP. The Windows 8 user interface was criticised as "tough to work with". Nick conceded that Microsoft may have done a less than adequate job of educating users in how to use its latest version of Windows.

Mike and Nick made the point that technology will move forward, regardless of whether individual users like it or not. But they also mentioned that Windows usability concerns are being addressed in the impending release of Windows 8.1. They gave a quick demo of some features of the Windows 8 interface and answered a few audience questions about it. Mike described his personal use of SkyDrive (Microsoft's cloud storage service) to access his data from anywhere. The two speakers together gave an overview of the Surface RT and Surface Pro products.

The discussion of Office 365 resumed with a live demonstration of some of the product's features. These included the built-in interface to SkyDrive, the range of different save formats that are supported, and PDF Reflow. PDF Reflow is a new feature in Word 2013 which enables a PDF to be opened, edited, and saved, as if it were an ordinary document file.

Outlook was discussed, including its new feature: "Conversations". Some detailed technical questions were asked and discussed about the configuration of Outlook and e-mail on smartphones.

Mike commented that the biggest new feature of Office 365 is that it is designed to connect to the outside world in more ways than just via SkyDrive. The web browser interface allows a user to access (for free) some features of Office 365 from any computer that is internet-connected. All that is required is a free Windows account.

Nick concluded the presentation by inviting all attendees to visit the Microsoft Store in the Danbury Fair Mall, where the staff will be happy to answer questions, provide demos, and assist users with problems they may have encountered with any Microsoft products. Microsoft provides free workshops and consultations at the store, as well as personal training sessions (for which fees are charged). Richard Corzo reminded members that further questions about Windows 8 may be brought to meetings of the Mobile Devices / Windows 8 SIG, on the 4th Thursday of each month.