What do you get when you use Office Desktop edition on the tablets? You get a the fully functional but with un-friendly touch interface. Even worse is that the Desktop app is still un-friendly to the tablet devices no matter how clean and simple the interface is. So, to get around the problem for using Office on tablets, you’re going to need the external keyboard and the mouse as long as they are USB compatible devices. That’s what you can get when using Desktop app because it’s difficult to tap on things like that. Once you’re finished, simply drag from top to bottom of the screen to close the Desktop app so that you can continue to use other Metro apps. Other than Office 15 and Internet Explorer 10, other desktop apps are not allowed so Windows RT may seem to be suitable for Metro apps which may be useful for tablets. In fact, having the Microsoft Surface device that runs Windows 8 Pro is kind of unacceptable to exist because the Desktop app is quite difficult to use with touch.
Last year, there was a question on whether the developers could develop the ARM version of Office and they did. So this led to Steve Ballmer to do the demo on Word and PowerPoint on ARM devices during the Consumer Electronics Show.
Office for Windows RT will be optimized to be Touch-Enabled, Portable with the ability to run on battery for long periods of time, having memory capabilities to start at 2GB and so on. Wow, 2GB of memory capabilities? Does it mean that 2GB of RAM and above is required on tablets? Perhaps you can to buy Asus Vivo Tab and its RT counterpart tablets for maximum performance.
For the new Office to take less energy of the CPU, Windows 8 adds the new coalescable timers which allow programs to be more battery-life friendly by specifying a range of time to wake up rather than an absolute interval to save battery life, compared to Windows 7 and below which was still ticking that you were guaranteed to wake up every ~16ms. Also, for Office 2k10, there were some situations where applications would wake up the CPU more than 1000 per minutes when the system goes idle but with the new Office, the developers have reduced that by 95% when the user isn’t interacting with the program. To save the battery life even more, the blinking cursor where you type in the text stops blinking after a few seconds if the user stops interacting with the application. However, this can get you lost on where you are in if you drift too far away from editing your documents so this one is kind of flawed in saving battery life.
For Windows Update in Windows 8, I bet that this is suitable for normal computers, not tablets because this is not how you update your tablets running Windows like that. Having to patch Windows RT with a bunch of updates is a huge no-no to us which may cause delays like that and multi-language support in Windows RT is kind of flawed as you may end up using the desktop Control Panel to do the installation which can also cause delays like spending time in doing the installation. THAT IS ANOTHER FLAW IN USING WINDOWS RT IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES, EVEN WITH SSD, IT TAKES TIME TO INSTALL! But, can they find a way to save time from doing that stupid installation?
For Office 15 as well as Windows RT combined, things may be extra costly with Mobile Network enabled so it’s best to use cloud technology by Wi-Fi only and thankfully, Office for Windows RT is able to warn you about this.
And lastly, how the hell can you import stuffs onto your documents as well as open and save documents in Office for Windows RT? Will that open up that freaking Open/Save As dialog box in desktop form for example?
Final flaw will include confusing Metro interface in Office 15 for tablets. When the buttons are not hovered, they remain button-less and become the links made of icons and texts compared to the interface of the past. Perhaps Office 15 for Windows RT is overall okay to use so be glad that they didn’t screw this up.
