Office 15 Technical Preview Screenshots Emerge

In summer this year, we’ll get the chance to have a look at Microsoft’s Office 15 Suite. Before that, however, we can only get a taste of what it has to offer courtesy of leaked screenshots from the Office 15 Technical Preview.

Microsoft released this early flavor of Office 15 in January, but only a small number of people had access to it at that time. Among them, we can count third parties such as businesses, partners and OEMs.

Courtesy of leaked screenshots coming from The Verge, we can now get a better idea of what the pre-beta Office 15 code, running as standard desktop application on computers based on Windows 7 and Windows 8, is all about.

In Office 15, Microsoft has decided to make a series of changes to its ribbon approach, through minimizing it by default (the same as it would be in Windows Explorer in Windows 8).

Office 15 apps will be present on WOA (Windows on ARM) as Metro-style apps with desktop-like capabilities, and will be available for free.

The upcoming Office 15 productivity suite in Windows 8 will arrive with a full screen "backstage" menu and will feature navigation controls on the left. Users will be able to open or minimize the ribbon interface through a pin icon.

The screenshots below also show that Microsoft has made a series of changes to the Outlook 15 application, which was not included in the company's preview of Office 15 on ARM. It will sport Metro-style navigation at the bottom.

Office 15 will also offer the possibility to easily share documents with others through broadcasting them online. A Present Online feature will be present in Office 15 for that (similar to the Broadcast Slide Show feature included in PowerPoint 2010).

Since the current version of Office 15 is only a pre-beta version, UI and under-the-hood changes are expected to emerge soon. Most probably, the beta release will offer more info on what Microsoft has in store for us with the new Metro-style look of its productivity suite.