With Windows 8, Microsoft has created an operating system that is, at least in part, genuinely usable with nothing more than fingers. While it took the company a long time to recognize that finger-based touch systems were more approachable than stylus-based ones, and that touch-based software needed to be designed to accommodate the imprecision that fingers imply, Microsoft has its finger-based platform at last with the new Metro-style interface and new Metro-style applications. Office 2013, however, isn't a new Metro-style application.

Instead, the suite contains two Metro-style Office apps: a new OneNote client (that will work alongside a regular desktop version) and a Lync client. Everything else is a desktop application, which poses a problem. Office is an important product for Microsoft and makes up a significant part of the Windows 8 sales pitch. Windows RT, the ARM variant of Windows 8 that will be used on the company's Surface tablets, will ship with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and the presence of these applications will be one of the big things that sets Windows RT apart from the iPad. For these programs to have any value at all, they have to be touch friendly.

So how did Microsoft do?

Ready to touch

Historically, the Office team never made any concessions to Microsoft's broader tablet ambitions. With the exception of OneNote, the Office apps have never been comfortable for pen users, and it seemed that the Office team was happy with that. That's no longer the case with Office 2013. The suite contains a range of improvements to make finger access better. Across the board, menus created in the main UI are given wider spacing when invoked with fingers. The same is true of the hovering formatting toolbars in Word and Excel; when touching the screen, they're much larger and easier to manipulate.

The sizing of the rest of the UI is controlled by a new touch mode toggle that changes the interface to better accommodate touch input. In theory, the applications will use this mode by default when installed on tablet hardware (though they didn't for me on a mouseless, multitouch Samsung tablet), and place a blue touch mode button in the quick access toolbar in the top left of the window.

There's also a full screen mode, controlled by a button next to the minimize button. Full screen mode is designed to mitigate the loss of screen space caused by the larger spacing and the on-screen keyboard. Hit this button and a few things happen. The ribbon, title bar, and quick access toolbar all disappear, replaced by a strip along the top of the window with a "..." either in the center (for OneNote) or on the right-hand side (for everything else). Tap that strip and the ribbon and status bars reappear. The status bar also disappears and similarly reappears when the "..." strip is touched. Windows 8's standard "swipe from the top of the screen" gesture doesn't bring up the ribbon; I think it would be more consistent if it did.

When the ribbon is displayed its touch mode, its spacing is altered to make the targets a little bigger. This is especially apparent on the various menus that can pop up from the ribbon; these are normally quite tightly packed.

As well as these spacing adjustments, the applications now respond to two-finger zooming. This mainly performs a conventional zoom, but in Outlook's calendar view it does a semantic zoom, allowing you to zoom right in to a single day, or all the way out to a month at a time. To this, Word also adds a tap-to-zoom feature when in Read Mode, to allow tables, images, or other objects to be zoomed in a similar fashion to touch-based browsers.

And... that's about it, the full extent of the finger support that Microsoft has added to Office 2013. If it doesn't sound like much, there's a good reason for that: it isn't. For stylus users, the company says that accuracy has been improved, particularly in OneNote, but using the software with fingers is problematic.

Inappropriate touching

First of all, there's all the stuff that's simply not touch enabled. The options screens, for example. While the drop-down lists do pick up the wider spacing when invoked with touch, that's about the only concession they make: tightly packed checkboxes and radio buttons remain the norm.

Even worse are the dialog boxes such as Excel's "Format Cells" or Word's "Paragraph." These don't have any concessions to touch control at all. Want to set up an e-mail account in Outlook? You'll be using the same dialogs as you do in Outlook 2010, in spite of their mouse-and-keyboard design.

Microsoft has even added new features in Office 2013 that are inaccessible to touch users. Outlook 2013's "peek" feature, which allows quick glancing at calendar, contacts, and tasks, is invoked with a mouse hover—something that has no analog for touch users.

These are not touch applications, and you will not want to use them on touch systems. They're designed for mice and they're designed for keyboards, and making the buttons on the ribbon larger does nothing to change that fundamental fact.

The Office 2013 apps also highlight more general flaws with Windows 8's touch support of desktop applications. The on-screen keyboard has two modes; it can either be free-floating above the desktop applications, or it can be docked to the bottom of the screen, which forces applications to resize to fit the remaining area. This latter mode is important for accessing, for example, forms that reach the bottom of a webpage, as the form fields would normally lie behind the keyboard.

Used in this docked mode, I found many visual glitches, particularly in Word. Tapping the "..." button to display the ribbon would dismiss the keyboard, but the status bar would then appear mid-way up the screen, as if it were trying to make room for the (now invisible) keyboard. I'm sure such issues are fixable—PowerPoint does quite a good job of making space for the keyboard and ensuring that the text you're editing is visible—but they point to the generic difficulties that Windows 8 has in trying to retrofit touch accessibility to desktop applications.

Controls such as Word's font picker become very awkward, too. This is a drop-down box, so it gets the extra spacing when in touch mode, but it's also editable, so the on-screen keyboard appears whenever you use it. The result is that you can only see a small number of fonts in the list, making the whole thing annoying to use. More generally, you find yourself having to shuffle around the screen, moving the keyboard and dialog boxes around so that the part you want to use is visible.

Conversely, the on-screen keyboard doesn't appear at all in Excel, whether you tap in a cell or in the formula bar to enter some text; you have to manually bring it up by pressing the keyboard icon on the taskbar.

Using Office 2013 on a touch machine is, at least in the public preview version now available, a tremendously frustrating experience. Even with the auto-hide ribbon, the Office applications are simply too complex to cope well with half their screen being covered up by an on-screen keyboard, and their interfaces are far too big for a simple band-aid such as "make the ribbon spacing a little larger" to be anywhere near adequate.

Things are a little better for stylus users—though we note that the ARM-powered Surface tablet doesn't support stylus input—because a stylus is almost precise enough to manipulate the checkboxes, radio buttons and so on—but the on-screen keyboard problems remain.

Clearly, this is not exposing the full power and complexity of Office 2013 to finger users; too much is still designed around pixel-perfect pointing devices. The Office team appears to be positioning touch support more as a way of enabling simple edits to be made as a kind of fall-back—a stopgap solution for those times when the mouse and keyboard aren't available.

The need for simplicity

As a set of reader applications, the suite works tolerably well. Opening and scrolling through documents works, and because these are the full Office programs, files are displayed with full fidelity and functionality. However, in this context, I find it hard to understand why Microsoft made the effort it has; Even Office 2010 works adequately well for just reading documents on a touch PC.

Unfortunately, as soon as one ventures beyond mere reading, the experience becomes unsatisfactory. Finger users attempting to make edits will find themselves regularly dumped into interfaces simply not designed for imprecise input, and even if they stick to the "main" user interface (the ribbon and pop-up toolbars), that interface works poorly. The interactions with the on-screen keyboard are frustrating and the interface is cluttered, leaving too little of the working area actually visible.

Having the real Office applications and their perfect support for Office documents is valuable—but this needs to be married to simpler interfaces that are engineered around reading and light editing, and that remove entire features and user interfaces that are too complex for finger usage.

As things stand, far from being a valuable feature of Windows RT, the Office 2013 applications threaten to make it worse.