"Organizations will be interested in this [the new user interface] because it makes Office more fun and more productive for end users, as well as potentially less intimidating," said Philipp Karcher, a Forrester Research analyst.

In Word, knowledge workers are bound to appreciate that the word processing app now opens PDFs and maintains the documents' formatting while editing them.

A new "read mode" is designed to enhance the reading experience in Word, a feature that will probably be most useful when using Office in tablets.

Meanwhile, Excel has gotten more user friendly with features like Flash Fill, which automates input, reformatting and rearranging of data, and with a simpler way of creating pivot tables and doing data analysis.