Office 365 Home Premium for Windows 8 brings with it massive change, possibly the biggest since Office 2003.
But the change is not so much about adding Windows 8 touchscreen capability to Office. Sure, it's there, but Office 365HP is mostly about integrating the cloud at all levels.
It also adds tools for working on documents collaboratively.
The difference begins in the way you buy 365HP - through your Microsoft account online. You don't buy it outright, but get a yearly subscription for $119. If you have several Microsoft devices - PCs, notebooks, tablets and smartphones - the price can be great value, as it serves for five devices and updates are free.
The subscription gives you the entire Office suite: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access and OneNote. Microsoft also throws in 20GB of SkyDrive online storage.
You can buy the more traditional Office 2013 outright. It starts at $169 per machine for the Home and Students version. This doesn't include Outlook - for that you need the Home and Business version, costing $299.
We tested 365 Home Premium on a new Lenovo ThinkPad 2 tablet. You manage the installation to your five devices from your Office account in a browser, which keeps track of the number of installs. You log in to initiate a download of the suite that installs desktop Office clients on your devices. You can de-authorise Office on any one of them and install it on another, but the total number of installs cannot exceed five.
To clear up any confusion, there are three distinct products: Office 365 Home Premium, which is the integrated cloud/desktop version we're looking at; Office 2013 desktop suite; and the Office Web apps that enable users to edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files on SkyDrive for free.
The new 365 Outlook client has an anaemic look: greyish text on a white background.
You can reply to emails from the preview pane without opening them with a set of new icons on the right-hand side that also enable quick deletion of unwanted items.
Outlook includes ActiveSync, so you can access the same Microsoft Exchange work mail that you receive on a smartphone. It took a call to Microsoft and some tweaking, but we managed to connect our work Microsoft Exchange server email account to Outlook running independently on a home PC.
There is another fly in the ointment here. Google is at war with Microsoft over Gmail. It has axed Google Calendar Sync. So if you can't get Gmail calendar and contacts on 365 Outlook, maybe it's time to swap to a Windows Live email account and enjoy work and home email integrated on one Outlook client.
The most interesting changes involve integration with SkyDrive. When you launch the Word client, SkyDrive is listed as one of the sources for documents you retrieve under "Open". Here you access SkyDrive documents synced to your local hard drive.
The "Add a place" option lets a user add other Skydrive or Office 365 SharePoint folders for quick access, but to use Word seamlessly with Dropbox you still need to install the Dropbox program (not the Dropbox Windows 8 app) and access files synced to your hard drive.
You get the fully integrated cloud experience when you access Skydrive from a browser You can open documents in desktop Word, or in the cloud version - the Word Web App. If you have linked other devices to Skydrive (using a security code) and a device is online, you can access and edit documents stored on them - even if they haven't been uploaded to SkyDrive.
The Word desktop client has good new features. You can edit PDF files - but not in the way you edit them in Adobe Acrobat or Nitro Reader. Instead Word converts a PDF to a Word document with images embedded in the text. You may lose some formatting, but you can copy and paste the text.
Other new Word features include live layout, which lets you position photos by dragging them around the text, and an insert mode for photos and even online videos from YouTube and Bing, or from supplied embedded code.
There's also a read only view which displays a Word document for easy viewing without the clutter of editing icons. You scroll sideways to read as you would for a Windows 8 Metro news story.
Excel too has new features. One, called Flash fill, recognises when you may be modifying data in one column to use in another. For example, you might have a column of full names and from it, create separate columns for first and last names. After adding a couple of entries, flash fill works out what you are doing, and adds the rest.
RATING: 8.5/10
PRICE: $119 a year online from Microsoft
