The wraps are coming off the new version of Microsoft Office, with the expected release date signified by its name, Office 2013.
[NB: A truncated version of this item was accidentally published on Friday 21 Sept. The full article has now been reinstated. Our apologies to those frustrated by the mistake last week. Ed]
The roll-out has reached the stage where general users are being invited to try out the new tools in a Customer Preview available via a subscription to Microsoft’s online Office 365 service. The trial is free for 30 days, but then kicks in with a fee of £4 a month for each user.
Microsoft’s suggested pricing for business will be based on annual subsriptions for using Office 2013 on up to five devices. If you are suspicious about the subscription model you can still buy traditional versions that are licenced for a particular device.
Aside from the growing emphasis on supporting desktop, online and mobile spreadheets, the most notable enahancements will be evident in a range of spreadsheet integrity and control modules, plus clever routines that suggest charting and pivot table treatments for the data being entered.
This version of Office is tightly integrated with Microsoft's Cloud-basedSkyDrive storage platform, but documents can still be saved to a local disk.
Office 2013 will only run on Windows 7 upwards, and has been showing up in previews on touchscreen Windows RT tablet computers.
Audit and analysis tools
For several years, Microsoft has been conscious about the lack of controls on spreadsheet use that can cause problems in corporate environments. Auditors have taken an anti-spreadsheet stance since the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 included statutory sanctions for poor internal controls.
Microsoft is addressing these problems in Excel 2013 using the expertise of a specialist developer spreadsheet control specialist Prodiance Corporation, which it acquired in 2011. Many of these functions have been integrated into Excel 2013 as new modules, including:
- Microsoft Office Discovery and Risk Assessment, which logs Office documents held in the corporate archive and assesses them for complexity, materiality and risk.
- Microsoft Office Spreadsheet Compare 2013 will identify differences between any two spreadsheets, and has a companion module for comparing Access databases.
- Microsoft Office Audit and Control Management Server 2013, meanwhile, can sit on the company network and track changes made to a spreadsheet down to cell level.
Smart charts and pivot tables
Undeterred by negative reactions to the context-sensitive Paperclip help tool, the thinking has been refined into new routines that will suggest potential chart and pivot table configurations for selected data. Located on the Insert menu tab, Chart Recommendations will show a seletion of suitable chart types for you to choose. Further enhancements to Excel 2013’s charting capabilities are documented in the Office 2013 team blog.
A similar option is available for PivotTables and PivotCharts that are built on the fly from the source data you select, cutting out the need to build them using the existing Wizard.
We look forward to hearing what Excel enthusiasts on AccountingWEB think about the new version, and whether the changes justify upgrading. If you have had a look at Excel 2013, let us know your thoughts by commenting below. In the period leading up to the full commercial release, we will publish further previews and assessments from contributors including Simon Hurst and David H Ringstrom.