0 Office 2013 released to manufacturers; expected in Q1 2013

A lot of things are afoot up at Microsoft, and the newest seems to be that Office 2013 has received the push to Release To Manufacturing stage. RTM means that the product is essentially final, with the code having received as much tweaking as it needed and is technically ready for a public release.

Office 2013, just like Windows 8, is a daring and ambitious effort from the Redmond crew, which is a ways departure from what we have come know the Office Suite to be.

Office 2013 will include the entire host of Office applications, along with cloud services, and servers. The most notable feature, however, is the fact that it has been optimized for touch input, making it easy to use even on tablets. Another nifty feature of the new Office suite is its integration with SkyDrive, Microsoft’s own cloud storage solution which will allow the user to access any documents from anywhere on the planet, provided they have internet access.

If you’re an MSDN or TehNet subscriber, the final version of Office should be available for download sometime mid-November. For the regular mortals out there, the final version of Office will be hitting store shelves sometime in the first quarter of 2013.

However, Microsoft has made a sweet deal to those buying Office 2010 from retailers October 19th onwards, which is that purchasing Office after the said date will entitle you to a free upgrade to Office 2013. Also if you’re part of the group buying the Microsoft tablets when they launch, you will be getting a free taste of Office RT.