Last month, Microsoft opened up Office 2016 on Windows Preview. Today, Microsoft announced that they have over one million customers using the Office Preview across both Windows and Mac platforms. This month they released new updates which added following new features in Office 2016 Windows apps.
Here’s a quick look at a few of the highlights:
- Real Time Presence in Word—While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon.
- Simplified file sharing—We are simplifying the process of sharing files and making them available to others to review, comment, and edit. Just clicking Share on the Ribbon will save your file to the Cloud and make it available to others in one easy step.
- Insights for Office (currently in Word and Outlook)—Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your reading experience. Try it by selecting keywords, like people or places, in your content and watch as Insights pulls relevant information into the Task pane to help you learn more.
- Version History improvements—We made it easier to find different versions of files stored on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. You can click the History command in the File menu to view or restore any previous version.
- Tell Me in Outlook—We have now made Tell Me available in Outlook. Tell Me, a new search tool already available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, serves up the commands you need by simply typing what you want to do using natural language. For example, in Outlook if you want to mark an e-mail as unread, you would simply type “mark unread” in the Tell Me Box.
- These are just a few of the highlights, with many others available including Power Pivot improvements, improved grammar checkers, and more.
If you haven’t joined Office 2016 Preview, you can join here.