Microsoft took the wraps off the new version of its Office products on Monday, July 16, in what CEO Steve Ballmer called the "most ambitious release" to date of the popular software suite, widely used in the business world. Adjusting to current trends, Office 2013 comes as a touch-ready version of the market-leading productivity software, eyeing mobile devices, cloud computing and social networking.

With a billion users worldwide, Office is the world's most popular productivity application, and it is also Microsoft's main revenue generator. Consequently, keeping the software fresh and up to current trends is essential to maintain the software giant's market lead in an increasingly competitive environment.

During an hour-long demonstration on Monday, Ballmer and Kirk Koeningsbauer, vice president of Microsoft's Office division, emphasized how the software had been adapted to current times in order to keep pace with technology changes. The new version of Office is fully touch-ready, following the footsteps of the company's latest operating system, Windows 8, and its new Surface tablet computer.

Surface is expected to hit stores in October, some two and a half years after Apple launched its now-market-leading iPad. According to analysts, Office gives Microsoft just the power it needs to gain a strong position in the post-PC market.

With the new Office 2013 suite, the popular Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are all responsive to touch screen controls for the first time. This means that users can tap, swipe, and pinch-and-zoom to handle documents, files and presentations. The new Office user experience is designed to be more "immersive," "visceral," and "multimedia-rich" compared to earlier versions of the software, noted Ballmer.

What It Brings New

With the new Office 2013, users can now mark up documents, slides, and presentations on mobile screens and draw on, annotate or highlight with a stylus, digital pen, or even a finger. Moreover, Microsoft is also adding Skype and enterprise social network Yammer into Office to offer live, multi-party conversations and virtual meetings, accessible within Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook.

Meanwhile, new "People Cards" include a person's digital "presence," meaning a photo, options to email, phone, instant message, or video chat, as well as activity feeds from the Facebook and LinkedIn social networks. In addition, Skydrive comes in to save and sync all Office documents in an online, cloud-based storage service, allowing users to access files and content created in Office on demand across multiple computing devices. During the presentation in San Francisco, Ballmer noted that Microsoft's new software suite has also been "designed as a service" to meet the needs of the increasingly more popular trend of cloud computing.