Despite many users not using all the features of the Office suite, Krishna said he believes that the new Office 2016 features might prove too attractive for companies or individuals not to upgrade.
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Firstly, we’ll focus on how you can get yourself a copy now that it’s available. As part of its transition to providing Office as a service though Office 365, Microsoft will be pushing frequent updates to this new version of Office. Automatic updates will begin rolling out to consumer and small business subscribers next month, and to commercial customers early next year.
Plus, Office 365 has proven to be an effective vehicle for introducing experimental new apps, like the PowerPoint alternative/killer Sway or the forthcoming GigJam work-sharing tool, to a paying audience. So, do you really need the latest version?
A personal subscription to Office will set users back $9 a month while a household account (allowing for five users) will cost $12 a month. That expands the number of devices the apps can be downloaded to and used on greatly.
Microsoft’s collaboration platform Delve (pic below) would also enhance this experience, according to Krishna.
That said, for business users (the people this is really aimed at, anyway), having in-line Skype conversations could in theory eliminate the need for other chat apps, like Slack.
Microsoft is yet to reveal pricing details of a standalone “perpetual licence” version of Office 2016, but has confirmed to Pocket-lint that one will be available in time.
Personal Office 365 subscriptions cost between about $6 and $10 a month, depending on whether buyers opt for monthly or annual subscriptions and how many devices on which the software may be installed.
When Microsoft first started adding the ribbon UI with Office 2007, the goal was to help people find commands more easily that was possible with the overloaded menu/dialog box system from previous versions. The venerable productivity suite has been a key component of most major companies’ workflows for years, if not decades.
Office 2016’s collaboration features are baked into multiple parts of the suite.
The feature is available in Excel, Word and PowerPoint, but not the rest of Office. That way, you can talk or text with them (or email if you don’t want to do it live) while you’re working on the document, making it much easier to collaborate. You only need hover over their pictures and names to get contact options.
If you subscribe to Office 365, you get a new “Groups” feature where you can throw a team together in Outlook 2016 with a shared calendar and dedicated cloud storage for project files.
I tested the client-facing portion of Office 2016.
Cortana can be linked with an Office 365 account, so can then be used for things like preparing for meetings and controlling calendars. New tools like Sway, a way to make instant PowerPoint presentations, and Planner, an app to manage projects, could be hits -but only if they’re spotted. You might even be able to avoid the browser sometimes, thanks to built-in Bing search results.
You can find out more at office.com/buy. It also follows the release of Office 2016 for Mac OS X users in July.
That strategy, with a few important additions along the way (Access, Outlook, and OneNote, for example), served Microsoft and its core corporate customer base well enough for more than 20 years. Over time, though, Outlook watches how you handle your mail – which documents you open right away and which you tend to ignore, delete or open much later.
This brings extra information and images into the sidebar when you lookup a term, allowing context without leaving Word.
A cool new feature in Outlook allows you to send attachments as cloud links rather than the entire file.
Instead of your boss sending a group email telling everyone what their new assignments are, your boss can simply drag and drop a responsibility from your column to your colleague’s.
“It’s moving to a “tell me what you want to do” process rather than just describing how a function works in the Help system”, explained Ellis. The versions aren’t all identical, but the interface makes sense across all the editions and every incarnation is solid in its own right.
Office web apps have offered real-time co-authoring, which lets you see what others are writing and editing in the same document, since November 2013. That was successful, but many users still can’t find some commands, so a new feature called Tell Me-which debuted first in Office Online-provides the next logical step. For example, Excel only has one notable change: six new chart types. All we really have here are six new chart types, including “Waterfall” (financial); “Pareto” (statistical); “Treemap” (hierarchical); Histogram; “Box and Whisker” (data distribution with range, quartiles and outliers); and “Sunburst” (hierarchical, shown above). More new charts, formulas, connectors, and other capabilities are coming throughout the year.
The new full-featured desktop Office 2016 suite is in addition to a second Windows version of Office – the touch-first mobile apps that Microsoft released earlier this year for use on Windows 10 tablets and touch-capable computers. And in Excel there are one-click forecasting options, to create forecast charts based on historical data with just a tap of a button.
Then, you invite others to work with you. This includes a list of documents they’ve worked on or shared with you, and the most recent things they’ve done to those documents.
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But Microsoft added other features, such as integrating its Bing search engine and Skype for Business directly into Word, hoping to convince customers the venerable Office suite is now “more social and collaborative”, said Shawn Villaron, group program manager of Microsoft’s PowerPoint team.
