14 DAY TRIAL // Unlike Windows 8, which is approaching the Beta development milestone, Office 15, the successor of Office 2010 is still in the early stages of development.
Office 15 reportedly reached Milestone 2 in March 2011, while Windows 8 is a tad more advanced, with the Windows team already at work on M3.
But just as it was the case with Windows 8, leaked screenshots from Office 15 reveal some aspects of the productivity suite’s evolution.
There are no actual bits that made their way in the wild yet, but leaked screenshots courtesy of Windows8Italia indicate that development is moving along nicely.
It appears that Microsoft continues with the GUI overhaul for the next generation of Office, borrowing Metro UI design elements for the revamping.
In addition, there are also new features already cooked into Office 15 Build 15.0.2703.1000, a release which belongs to the M2 stage of development.
Office 15 Excel will feature a new history filtering tool for data dubbed Timeline. It appears that at least for the time being, Timeline is not working, and as such its functionality remains pretty much up to speculation.
In addition to the new Timeline feature, Office 15 Excel will also sport a new dialog window for the introduction of graphics within spreadsheets; the option to import data via Atom, and a range of conversion enhancements, bit-wise operations and new trigonometry operations.
Word will also get kicked up a notch in Office 15. According to information from the recent leaks, Office 15 Word documents will support the integration of online multimedia content, such as video or audio files.
Users will also be permitted to broadcast their docs across the web, and will be able to enjoy new, smoother effects when selecting text or scrolling pages.
Customers taking advantage of Office 15 Visio will be able to enhance diagrams with sketch effects.
Microsoft Limestone is also included in Office 15 Build 15.0.2703.1000, a component designed to streamline the testing of user interface elements which will not be included in the RTM version of Office 2010’s successor.
