These are the Office icons Microsoft rejected

"Microsoft is busy rolling out new curvy and colorful new Office icons, and now it's revealing a set of design concepts it experimented with before finalizing these new icons. Some of the concepts are radically different from what Microsoft is shipping, with design explorations for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that more closely resemble the Office for Mac icons of the past."

"The Word concept icons (above) include a notepad-like experiment and different ways to visualize stacks of paper, or documents. Microsoft experimented with making the Word lettering the key part of the icon, and also versions where the lettering blends in or is totally absent. Microsoft eventually settled on a design that has three horizontal bars instead of four, and it's using versions of the icon with and without lettering."

"PowerPoint has always been about slides, and Microsoft experimented with a variety of ways of visualizing that for its latest PowerPoint icon. A couple of concepts focus on the lettering, turning into a ribbon-like P or a P letter with a pie chart hanging off of it. The final icon design is a lot more tame though, with a slightly more rounded and colorful take on the current PowerPoint icon."

Microsoft rolled out new curvy, colorful Office icons while also revealing a set of earlier design concepts. Experiments for Word included notepad-like forms, various visualizations of paper stacks, and versions emphasizing, blending, or omitting Word lettering; the final Word icon uses three horizontal bars and appears with and without lettering. Excel concepts centered on cell representations with limited divergence from the final icon; an X-focused variant stood out. PowerPoint explorations visualized slides in many ways, including ribbon-like Ps and a P with a pie chart; the final PowerPoint icon is slightly more rounded and colorful. Windows receives lettered versions; iOS gets letter-free icons.

Read at The Verge