Since the introduction of Microsoft’s Office products back in 1988, the suite has been primarily used by individuals performing any number of tasks. Those include word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, and more.
While Office certainly made a lot of people more proficient at their jobs, the suite lacked the ability to easily collaborate on projects without sending files back and forth or making obligatory “notes” on already created documents. This lead to more work and more time to complete seemingly simple tasks.
Well, as the cloud becomes more and more a part of our everyday life and collaboration one of the most important parts of business, Microsoft is answering the call. Here are some of the newest features of Office 2016:
Co-Authoring
Co-authoring will allow you to work with other people simultaneously on any device that supports Office.
Real-Time Typing
While co-authoring is nice, it only works well if you can tell what the other person is doing. Real time typing allows you to collaborate with others on the same document, and see what others are typing.
Mail Attachment Priveleges
Emailing attachments takes a new leap forward with the ability to attach a document to email, send it to OneDrive or SharePoint and create specific permissions allowing recipients to read or write certain documents.
Advanced Charting
Using many visualization tools such as Treemap, Histrogram, Boz and Whisker, and Sunburst your statistics will never look better and easier to understand.
Smart Lookup
Microsoft brings the power of Bing to Office with Smart Lookup. You’ll be able to fact check and search for terms by simply highlighting the word – you’ll then see Bing search results right in the document.
These are just a few of the pretty sweet new tools from Microsoft Office, and you can see a full list here. Office 2016 was released this past week on September 22nd, so if you’re looking to upgrade check out this great article on How-To-Geek.
Time will tell how Office 2016 is adopted, but so far there has been a pretty positive reception which is a coup for Microsoft considering many pundits have been quick to point out they’ve fallen behind rivals Apple when it comes to OS and companies like IBM and Oracle when it comes to the cloud.