Office 2016 Preview

Check out the latest features

Microsoft’s, soon to be released, Office 2016 offers users a range of tools and features aimed at the modern workforce who are highly mobile, who work in teams, and collaborate on projects. Office 2016 users can avail of new functionality across the entire Office suite, allowing them to integrate cloud-based content seamlessly into their daily workload.

For example, when attaching files in Outlook 2016 users will now be able to share a link to a file stored on SharePoint, or on OneDrive for Business. This eliminates duplicating copies of files to each email recipient, and reduces the chances of having different updated versions of files in use. Files can be shared as either Edit or View Only. Greater functionality around Groups (distribution lists) allows users to manage and track group activities with greater ease. Clutter is a new feature of Outlook 2016 that automatically moves low-priority messages out of the inbox and into their own folder. Clutter determines which messages you are most likely to ignore and moves these to the Clutter folder.

When collaborating on documents in Word (stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business), users will now be able to view edits by colleagues in real-time. Changes are displayed automatically as others edit and update the document. Real-time co-authoring should be available to other applications such as Excel in the near future.

Tell Me

The Tell Me box, added to the Office 2016 ribbon, allows users to ask (using natural language query) a question on how to carry out specific tasks in their applications and Office will refine the available results as the query is typed. It also stores a list of the recent Tell Me queries.

In Excel 2016 business intelligence functionality has been greatly enhanced. Power Query is now integrated and does not require a separate download. This tool allows Excel to analyse, combine, and refine data across a wide range of sources including relational databases and online data sources. Excel 2016 also boasts new improvements to its Pivot Tables, Forecasting, and Charting (TreeMap, Sunburst, Waterfall, and Box & Whisker) features.

Sunburst