Have you installed Word for Windows 10 yet?

I did and have been using it for a few days.

I’ve been waiting for a touch version of Office for a while now and apparently Microsoft has finally heard what many of us have been saying – we need touch! – and is working on a new “universal” version of Office.

The Office Preview came out on Feb 4 and I installed it. It included Word for Windows 10, Excel for Windows 10, and PowerPoint for Windows 10. Do you see the pattern? You have to have Windows 10 Technical Preview installed for this version of Office to work.

The plan is for the entire suite to be available for free and pre-installed on any Windows 10 phones and small Windows 10 tablets. Though, you may have to pay for some functionality and business users will probably have to keep paying their Enterprise Agreements.

It is scheduled to be released to the Windows Apps Store later this year.

So, after a few days, here are my first impressions of Word for Windows 10:

Pros:

• Universal across all of your Windows devices – computer, tablet, phone – or at least that is the promise from Microsoft. Right now it is still in Preview, so I don’t believe it would work on the phones but we do have it installed on one of our Surfaces.
• Touch Interface – love the touch-friendly menus; they are easy to use and intuitive. Word can finally be navigated with your finger easily and you don’t really need a mouse or a keyboard – I guess that’s the idea, right? Well, as I said, I have thought for a while now that Microsoft needed to created Office (including Word) that will work in the touch mode that will allow easy editing, markup and use of word processing.
  
• Insights for Office feature – this is pretty cool. In read mode, if you use this feature, you can get definitions and references delivered right to you – sort of like the Kindle does now but with a little more flair. I like this feature a lot.
  

Cons:

• Not yet ready for prime time – there are still lots of bugs, glitches and freezes that happen regularly.
• Some of the features do not work with other versions of Word. For example, we tried the Sharing option and were not able to edit the documents in real time. We assume it was because we were using Office.com with it. Since we don’t have Word for Windows 10 on another computer, this feature was useless to us.
  
• Simplistic edit options – The Preview version of Word seems scaled down compared to the full blown version. It’s, perhaps, better than Office.com but much less so than a Office365 subscription. If you want more functionality, you’ll have to pay for it.

These are my quick impressions after only a couple of days use. How about you? Have you been using Office for Windows 10? What are your impressions?

Joanna-