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Universal, Touch-Friendly Office Released for Windows 10

Windows 10 maybe not be coming until later this year, but Microsoft is busy at work building application for it, including probably the most important consumer application – Microsoft Office.
Yesterday Microsoft released early preview builds of Universal (meaning that it will run on any flavor of Windows 10 – desktop or mobile) Office applications for Windows 10.
Excel_UI_900x530Applications could be downloaded now from Windows 10 Store:
Word Preview
Excel Preview
PowerPoint Preview
It took Microsoft a while to completely revamp Office application to make them touch-friendly. When Windows 8 was released in 2012 it provided a full touch support and was optimized to run on touch screen computers. The Office 2013 however wasn’t exactly touch friendly. Sure, it’s possible to use finger when working with Windows desktop UI, but this experience is not exactly enjoyable.
Microsoft Surface RT which was a first Microsoft’s foray into computer manufacturing bundled a free copy of Office 2013 which was rebuilt to operate on ARM CPU, but … still didn’t support Modern UI. I guess desktop Office was the only reason for adding desktop mode to Windows RT.
In 2014 Microsoft finally released touch-friendly Office for iPad and then later for iPhone and Android. And now a full-featured Office with Modern UI is coming to Windows 10 as a first class citizen.

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Stan Tarnovskiy

Solutions Architect at Perficient

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