The Windows 10 Review: The Old & New Face of Windows
by Brett Howse on August 25, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
Touch-Enabled Office Apps Arrive with Windows 10
When Windows 8 launched, Microsoft had built a touch-first version of their operating system, but they had not yet completed their touch-enabled version of their most popular productivity suite. In fact, in the almost three years between Windows 8 and Windows 10, Microsoft released Office on iOS first, and then Android, leaving their own platform as the only one without a touch-enabled version of Office. Finally, with Windows 10, Office Mobile is here.
These are, like practically all pieces of Windows 10, Windows Universal Apps, and therefore they are made to scale all the way from a phone to a large display desktop. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all available. The experience is very similar to how it looks on the other platforms, and Microsoft has done a nice job keeping the look and feel consistent across the different mobile operating systems.
I think most people are familiar with the Office trio of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and perhaps not quite as familiar with OneNote, but the mobile apps are surprisingly competent versions, and can likely easily replace the full Office suite for a lot of people. If you need some of the extra functionality like conditional formatting in Excel, or the ability to open password protected documents, you will need to go with the full version of Office, at least for now.
In pretty typical Microsoft fashion, the apps have been created to allow basic file reading, creation, and editing for free, but if you want to access all of the features you need to purchase an Office 365 subscription. There is a big caveat here though. This only applies to devices under 10.1 inches in screen diameter. Anything larger than this requires a subscription to gain access to edit, which is a pretty big concession. According to Microsoft, they want to keep the free capabilities available for devices that are mostly used with touch, and the Office team feels this cut-off is 10.1 inches. Amazingly, the same company also sells a consumer version of their tablet line, the Surface 3, which is a 10.8 inch device and therefore over the cut-off. They do sell it with a one year subscription, but it’s a rather odd way to market the new Office Mobile apps.
There is also a new piece to the Office puzzle, which is called Sway. Luckily, like OneNote, Sway is free for all users. So what is Sway? It is an interactive storytelling app, and it lets you easily add some text and media, and it will create a sway for you. It’s very much a cloud based app, and you can share links to your sway to view or edit. Think of it like a simpler version of PowerPoint. Here is a sway as an example of what it can do.
OneNote is of course back, and this is Microsoft’s app which lets you do a lot more than just take notes. The touch version is changed from Windows 8, and it now fits in with the theme of the other Office Mobile apps. Fans of the Windows 8 version’s radial menu will be disappointed though since that has gotten the axe.
I think the capabilities of these apps are going to improve over time, but it is unlikely they will ever offer the full functionality of the desktop version of Office. They are targeted towards a different set of needs. It was certainly one of the key missing pieces of the Windows 8 era, so it is great that they have made their debut with Windows 10. Only OneNote is installed out of the box, and the other apps can be found in the store.
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SeleniumGlow - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
What about the changes and enhancements to the Audio stack. The new windows 10 Audio stack is redesigned completely so that it reduces inputs and recording latency. This supposedly makes windows 10 Audio API on par with something like ASIO, by reserving a complete CPU core.Rickkins1 - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
Bwahahahaha, this is comedy gold. Browse microsoft's forums to see the multitude of complaints about win10 breaking sound cards etc.Rickkins1 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
I'd just like to thank microsoft for that totally unbiased review of windows10.But seriously, c'mon, will ya...?? Do you really take us for complete idiots...??
At least have the honesty to label such a piece as "advertisement".
Oracv4Prez - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Amongst all the glow and gushing comments I think that Windows 10 is horribly flawed. Lets start with the upgrade: Th new font renders incredibly poorly on my screen (1920 x 1200) Samsung and looks horribly blocky - like an ancient PC from the 80's. Secondly, half of the programs dont work anymore and when I tried to open Microsoft's own office applications, the links all failed.SO you want to try out Edge??? No doubt it is faster for all the sites I visit. But...what about your bookmarks/favorites. It wont except anything but IE 11 and if you have them neatly sorted and try to move from another browser to IE the organisation dies.
And finally when you think you have a few things working, it crashes. Oh well, we all have the dreaded blue screen of death now and them. It politely tells you that there is an error so it will restart. You could wait --- and wait ... and wait for something to happen, but no - nothing!!!!
Tried the solutions on the web, but obviously there are still a LOT of holes to patch. Oh, and the last update (before I banished it) did more damage than the initial install, causing perfectly functioning applications to crash/or the link to disappear.
Rating: - pre-beta software status. Use at your peril!
TheReviewWriter - Monday, September 7, 2015 - link
I love it Very smooth makes me feel organized and smart LOL :)Ramon Zarat - Monday, September 14, 2015 - link
No matter how you slice it, Windows 10 is a step in a VERY wrong direction. If the product is free, YOU become the product. I *HATE* this business model consisting of trading most if not all your privacy *AND* control over your product for $149.00 (typical Windows license price).The entire M$ product portfolio is going into that direction. Their first failed move was the Metro atrocity to force you into the M$ store with Windows 8. Then you had Office 365 you rent for a monthly fee FOREVER instead of owning the product. Then they tried to impose an "always on" connection to the XB1 + restriction on sharing games and failed miserably. Now, it's the turn of the entire OS to be free, but at what price?
I'm a paying M$ customer since Windows 95 but this time, I'll wait until a fully hacked and fully sanitized version of Windows 10 comes out, including with the choice to install or not "upgrades" from Windows update and turning off and all the spyware shit for good.
I want to own my stuff, not rent them forever, not for free with tons of negative impacts either. I want to control what I own. I want my data stored locally, not in the cloud. And finally, I don't want to share anything that concerns only me. The *ONLY* technological improvement Windows 10 bring to the table compared to Windows 7 that is worthy of mention to me is DirectX12. If hackers can one day bring DX12 to Win7, I'll simply never upgrade.
clarkrptg - Tuesday, September 15, 2015 - link
I would think twice about upgrading to Windows 10. I did so and now have a completely unusable computer with a black screen. I guess I should have known better,but don't understand how Microsoft gets away with this crap over and over and over again. I am moving to Mac . . . no doubt about it. I googled the issue and find a comment from Microsoft, oh, gosh golly,yes, resulting black screens are a problem. Oh, gee whiz, sorry about that. Take your computer into a Microsoft store, blah, blah, put back to factory settings, blah, blah. I have a suggestion for you Microsoft . . . I WILL NEVER BUY ANOTHER MICROSOFT COMPUTER AGAIN.Miller1331 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Such an upgrade over Windows 8. Microsoft have done good this timeConcettaBustamante - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
My colleagues were searching for NY DTF IT-2663 a few weeks ago and used a document management site that hosts a lot of fillable forms . If others want NY DTF IT-2663 too , here's a link http://goo.gl/JQA7yVkelli stark - Tuesday, February 20, 2018 - link
WINDOWS 10 reviews are coming positive mostly like start menu is back, internet explorer is replaced by Microsoft edge there are soo many changes that are done to windows 10 you can also check reviews on this site https://www.ticketgateway.com/profile/user_profile... and you will get more updates about Windows 10