Be Excellent To Each Other

If you've got a Live account, you can sign up for Office 365 and get up to five installs of Office 2013, which will apparently work until early next year.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

I am giving it a shot.

Ooh!

Let's!

Now it's playing a video...

The icons have all changed.

It's Word! The way the letters appear as you type is... Strange. It's like they're animated on.

Note the uncropped 'alt+print screen' screenshot of Word includes some overlap, so they're doing odd things with the chrome, I suspect.

Are you sure you didn't just install The Sims?

The icons were all different going from 2007 to 2010.

Everything is animated, but apart from that there doesn't seem to be any difference so far (although I'm only using Excel right now).

Oh, except since I installed it, all the icons for files in the project tree of my PHP IDE have changed to the 'image' icon, which has to be related

Except for the acres of whitespace. I don't like it much in screenshots, but I'm reserving judgment until I've used it.

I'll be doing this next week, but with SharePoint 2013.

Somehow, I don't think I'll be inflicting a running commentary onto Beex. You might be bastards, but you don't deserve that.

Why are all the menu headings in capital letters in that screenshot? Makes it look terrible, and probably affects the readability too.

Certainly does! For text you're supposed to scan, the lack of diversity in the upper parts of all-uppercase words slows you down massively.

Excel 2012 refers to itself as "we", as in "Done! We made 12,343 changes."

That's weird, right?

I'm guessing—just guessing, mind—that Microsoft beat all its UI designers to death with a claw hammer shortly after the good bits of Metro were done with.

It's being cheerily inclusive. It wasn't just Excel that made those changes, you helped; you're a team! Go Team Excel & Grimm! Changing the shit right out of that data! Data changing bro's!

Now I want to high five it!

The capitals thing was going to be a windows 8-wide thing. I'm pretty sure the RTM Windows 8 i stuck on my work laptop doesn't do it though, presumably because someone noticed that it's shit.

It's certainly on the Visual studio 2012 I have. Well, was until I stopped it looking so ugly.

I've just discovered that Word (and presumably everything else) 2013 saves your undo states. So, assuming you created a file in Word, you can load it up a month later, hold down CTRL+Z, and it'll go right back to a blank page.

Will trialling this uninstall my Office 2010 installation?

Only I no longer work at the company that generously donated their corporate key to me for it, so I'd be a bit fucked if I couldn't go back to it following the trial.

Of course, I could just not bother. It is only Microsoft Office, after all.

Dunno, to be honest. The Internet probably does.

It looks mental! For this reason, I'm going to try it.

Nah, office versions happily coexist