The Microsoft Office team just released an update on their official blog about a YouTube video covering how Office intelligence aids in productivity. The Office 365 package includes many apps and services like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook and is used by businesses worldwide.
In the video, Microsoft’s Ben Walters joins Jeremy Chapman and kicks off the presentation by showcasing some of the new features coming to Office and Office Online as well as Office Mobile.
Some of the new improvements include fixes and backend changes for the new PowerPoint designer. The Designer automatically identifies the images you put into a slide and helps you choose a great look and alignment for them.
Next up, via Word Tap, Word 2016 can now easily connects to the cloud and grab any documents from Microsoft Delve, paste them into your current text document, and merge these two by a simple drag and drop from the sidebar.
Excel 2016 now has Map support and can easily connect chart data into a map of a country, continent, or the world itself. The Azure Machine Learning add-in provides the new data visualization intelligence.
Outlook 2016 receives the Focused Inbox feature that we have seen on mobile devices for quite a while. Originally an iOS-only feature, it’s now available for every platform except Windows 10. The Focused Inbox feature is a machine learning-based mechanism that learns how you respond to different emails if you respond to them at all, and categorizes every new mail into two sections, Focused and Other. The Focused inbox covers your important emails and the Other inbox includes regular, not so important, ones.
Outlook Mobile also receives more intelligence in analyzing email to identify important information for Action Cards. Things like flight information and calendar events can benefit from integrated free/busy time analysis to make it easier to schedule appointments.
Finally, the video covers the new browser experience for Office, which has a new customizable launcher and a new UI. The entire experience has been redone in order to enhance ease of use and make it simpler for less tech-savvy people by integrating the Tell Me engine from Office 365’s Help backend.
Machine intelligence is gaining traction in making Office 365 a more productive environment. Let us know in the comments which of this new functionality is most helpful to you.