Review: Microsoft Office for Windows 10

OneNote

OneNote has been available as a Windows 8 touch app for some time, but there's a new preview version in the works. We can't say we're impressed.

First, it adopts a different layout to the main OneNote Windows application, with individual pages listed down the left, rather than the right, of the screen, and with previews of the page contents included. This means only four or five page titles can be displayed on screen at a single time, resulting in a lot of vertical scrolling.

It also had a nasty bug in our tests, where notebooks that had been previously renamed were still displayed using their old names. These new names show in every other version of OneNote we've tested, suggesting it's a gremlin that Microsoft needs to sort – and sharpish, if it wants to avoid any ugly synchronisation errors.

How will the apps look on phones and compact tablets?

Windows 10 isn't only for PCs, laptops and tablets. The same codebase will also be used on Windows 10 phones and compact tablets, as will these universal Office apps. However, their appearance is very different on these small-screen devices.

The Ribbon menu used in the tablet apps simply doesn't work on small screens that are predominantly used in portrait mode. Instead, Microsoft has built the Ribbon menu into the app bar at the bottom of the screen. This overlays the menu options (Bold, Underline, Bullets, Numbering and so on) over the top of the document; you select the feature you want to use, hide the Ribbon menu, then apply it to the document laying beneath. Users can scroll through the different Ribbon tabs on a dropdown menu.

Crucially, Microsoft also re-formats documents so that they fit on the mobile screen. This means images may be positioned, or wrap around text, in a different way than they would on a PC or laptop screen. You almost certainly won't want to be doing any heavy editing on phones or compact tablets, therefore, as the layout of your document could be altered in unexpected ways.

Verdict

Overall, we're largely underwhelmed by the Office apps on Windows. At best, they're as good as the equivalents for iOS and Android.

In some cases, such as with PowerPoint and OneNote, there's a lot of work to be done. While we're mindful that these are works in progress, we can't help thinking that Windows users are being offered almost nothing that hasn't already been released on rival platforms – and many months ago in the case of iOS.

If even Microsoft can't provide compelling reasons to choose Windows over iOS or Android, what hope have third-party developers got?

That said, the Office apps for Windows could prove valuable for Windows tablet users in one crucial regard: they take up a fraction of the storage space of the full desktop applications. The Word preview takes up on 25.8MB of disk space on our test tablet, for example, while Office 2013 requires 3GB of disk space on our laptop. For those running tablets with only 16GB or 32GB of storage, that alone could make the world of difference.

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk