NOTE: This review is based on the Office 2013 Technical Preview.

Do you feel modern? The next version of Microsoft Office gets the Metro treatment, with a touch-friendly interface as well as new features, and goes to the cloud, with subscription pricing, on-demand installation and automatic syncing of settings and documents you save in the cloud – if you want to pay for it that way. So we've taken an in-depth look at what you get and how well the Windows 8-influenced interface works in practice.

Although the preview suite is called Office 15, individual applications such as Word and Excel get the 2013 tag, so we expect the final release will be called Office 2013.

As usual, the technical preview includes more applications and features than you'll get in all the versions of Office 2013: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath and Lync – plus the Metro versions of OneNote and Lync.

Some of those will come with Windows RT (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus the two Metro apps), but we're not including those in our Office 2013 review because we haven't spent time using them yet.

There are Office 2013 versions of the Exchange, SharePoint, Project and Lync servers as well, which businesses can run in-house or use the cloud versions of (through the Microsoft-run Office 365 service or from the usual mix of hosting companies).

You will still be able to buy Office 2013 as traditional software that you pay for in advance, but you can also buy Office as a subscription, through Office 365. That gets you the full desktop and Metro applications, not just the Office web apps (which also get an update), plus Office for Mac and for any other devices that Office applications are available for (such as OneNote for iPhone, iPad and Android devices).

There are four different plans available (they're all labelled Preview at the moment but we expect the names to be final, and we expect these to correspond to the boxed versions of Office 2013). There's no sign of Office Starter, which we expect to be replaced by the free Office web apps.

And as you might expect, Office 2013 only runs on Windows 7 and 8, not on XP or Vista.

Office 365 Home Premium is the consumer version: you get Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher, you can install then on up to five PCs at once and you get 20GB extra storage on SkyDrive for saving documents to the cloud.

Office 365 Small Business Premium gives you the same applications but with Office 365 accounts instead of SkyDrive, so you get Exchange email, SharePoint document management and Lync video conferencing.

Office 365 ProPlus adds InfoPath and Lync; Office 365 Enterprise has the same applications as ProPlus but the Office 365 accounts you get are the enterprise plan, which has the full version of Exchange, including email archiving.

With all of these, you don't have to worry about downloading and saving a large installer for Office. Whether you start the download from the Office 365 site or you try to open an Office document on a PC that doesn't have Office on, the apps stream from the cloud.

It uses a much improved version of the Click-to-Run virtualisation that Microsoft uses for the Office 2013 trial versions, which enables you to start using the applications just a few minutes after you download them.

There's a PowerPoint slideshow of new features that opens in PowerPoint while the other applications stream down and you pick options such as the design you want to see in the ribbon.

You don't even have to uninstall your current version of Office, and Office 2013 picked up all our settings - from email accounts to custom AutoCorrect entries, Office add-ins and the buttons we'd added to the Quick Access Toolbars. This is your personal version of Office, just a lot quicker.