It taps into Bing’s Insight Engine to show you the accurate information in a right-hand pane. But that vision will take time to pan out.
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Office 365 series, 2016 version will differ from its predecessor versions largely on how the suite of products is used. For these customers, the fact that Office is a known and familiar quantity, alongside the love and attention that Microsoft is giving to the suite, would make it seem like far too much disruption and bother to move away from Office. Some new chart types have also been added to Excel, making it the ideal tool for presentation experts.
Looking forward, there’s plenty of news on the horizon after Tuesday’s launch. The Home & Student edition is $149, and Home & Business is $229. In our testing, Word 2016 still locks documents on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, so while multiple people can work on different parts of the document simultaneously, they do not appear to be able to do so on the same part. Sway is the first new member of the core office suite since the 2003 introduction of note-taking application OneNote. If you’re creating a résumé or an angry letter of complaint, then it’s the tool of choice.
A new “Tell Me” feature allows users to search for a function such as “watermark”.
And of course, you can use video chats while typing. I still reach to my browser and Google stuff though, so I doubt this will be helpful for most people. This is called co-authoring. You hover over a word in PowerPoint, for instance, and you can look it up using the feature. But cough up your cash regularly, and Office will get better, forever. In addition to desktop versions of Office, Office 365 is the only way to get access to Microsoft’s new mobile versions of Office for Windows 10.
Folks at Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) are excited about today because the company is officially launching its new office software, Office 2016.
While Microsoft has been pushing the cloud subscription model, there has always been a perpetual licence offering. Here’s Office 2013 (top) compared to Office 2016 (bottom).
Out of the box, GigJam supports a bunch of common workplace apps, including Microsoft Outlook, Asana, SugarCRM, and Salesforce, Mital says.
Thankfully, there are some interesting additions to Outlook 2016 that make email less daunting. Now if a group of employees is working on a Word document, for example, they can view one another’s comments as they are written. This is a trick that Google and Dropbox have both toyed with, but it feels more natural in Outlook.
The Outlook email client (pic above) has also been integrated with contextual and predictive forms – for example, the Clutter feature sorts out email and puts low-priority emails in a separate folder while summarising the day’s mail. Basically, it works the same way as Gmail, when you want to share Google Drive files.
It’s been a successful sales pitch for Microsoft so far, with Office 365 actually cannabalizing sales of the boxed version of Office. But half the fun of getting a new piece of software, whether it be a productivity app or game, is in exploration and finding specific features for the way you work. There’s a certain ubiquity to the group tools that can be a bit unsettling in that they are everywhere. That proved once and for all that Microsoft wasn’t going to hobble Office on other platforms in the interest of propping up its own operating system. I found myself longing for the distraction of Slack when working on documents.
Office is 25 years old this year. Microsoft said this suite was specifically built for teamwork, and you’ll find that’s true throughout all of the applications. You only need hover over their pictures and names to get contact options. Sway is nothing like the rest of the Office Suite apps and, if Word and PowerPoint had feelings, they might be jealous. You won’t have to wait two or three years for the next version. Those apps, released along with Windows 10 in July, are designed more for lightweight editing and as a companion to the desktop apps. It’s worth taking a look at the announcements before opining on what it all means. As part of their subscription, Office 365 customers will receive new features and capabilities continuously in Office desktop apps.
For Windows 10, Microsoft has additionally enabled Windows Hello to let you sign in to your PC and Office 365. Editing documents on these apps is basic, but it’s enough if all you need to do is a few sums in Excel or letters in Word.
Collaboration was a focus of Office 2000, too.
Even navigating the Office apps themselves is now easier.
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For folks who lived through the era of conventional mammoth software upgrades-me included-the new age of ongoing improvement requires a mental shift. But expect Microsoft to make the case to businesses that Windows 10 is a logical and valuable upgrade from the Windows 7 that many companies are running. If you’re using Office at work, the 2016 release will really tie these together nicely, and at home there’s OneDrive and Office apps for all your devices. “More people collaborate on work as groups and teams, so Office 2016 represents the change from personal productivity to team productivity”.
