Microsoft Announces Office 2016 and Office For Windows 10 Coming Later This Year
An anonymous reader writes At its Windows 10 event yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the touch-optimized version of Office. Today, the company offered more details about that version, and then snuck in another announcement: the next desktop version is under development, it is called Office 2016, and it will be generally available "in the second half of 2015." Office for Windows 10 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook), meanwhile, is also slated to arrive later this year, though Microsoft has shared more about it and plans to offer a preview in the coming weeks. These new Office apps will be pre-installed (they will be free) on smartphones and small tablets running Windows 10. They will also be available to download from the Windows Store for other devices.
I wonder, if Microsoft will produce anymore a desktop optimized version of Office and or Windows? Those Word screenshots look absolutely horrible. Are they really removing the existing features so that soon the Word is similar to Notepad? Why would I buy a office suite that does not have the features I use, or the features are hidden behind ten layers of ribbons? I bet on next version all the buttons are replaced with hamburger-button, perhaps even the text color is fixed to light gray, so the UX guys almost get the plain white screen they thrive to.
Office 365 is not software per se, but a service that also happens to include software. It includes Office 2013, which surely will be updated to 2016 as soon as it is available. And as far as we can see, it has been and continues to be quite successful.
Can they please make the programs load more quickly? Why does it take 30 seconds (at least) for Powerpoint to start? Almost as long for Word? These programs took that long to load on my Mac in 1990. Today, they should load in the blink of an eye. What the heck is wrong?