Microsoft’s beautiful, clever, flawed Office 2013 preview

Microsoft Word, like the rest of Office, has been given a design refresh. It now has a beautiful, minimalist look that gets out of the writer’s way.

There are handy new features like the ability to edit PDFs and the software integrates smoothly with Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service.

For the first week or so of testing the software I enjoyed it and was gearing up to write high praise. It briefly looked as if Microsoft had delivered the ideal writing tool for journalists.

Unstable software tells a story

Sadly, the preview, that’s Microsoft’s way of saying beta without using the B-word, is unstable.

Sure, instability is what you expect from beta software. I’m not complaining about that. What isn’t so tolerable is that this particular beta doesn’t uninstall – at least not from my desktop.

And, the traces left screw around with my earlier Office 2010 installation to the point where I worry that may now also be unstable.

Catastrophic error

The Word 2010 document icons have changed to  the Word 2013 format and the list of files in the task bar at the bottom of the screen no longer functions. There has been some strange behaviour when saving documents – that doesn’t make me feel confident.

I’ve worked through a long and complex fix suggested on the Microsoft Answers site, but that resolved nothing.

Companies release beta software, we understand early versions are troublesome. Not providing a way to uninstall and get the computer back to normal is not OK.