Update: Microsoft has reposted the official announcement, so you can expect the update to begin rolling out soon.
Original post:
A major update to the preview of Office 2016 was described by the Office Blog but at the moment the post has been taken down, meaning the update may not have actually shipped yet. That being said, the changes listed are likely accurate even if the update isn’t currently available. A number of sites, including Thurrott.com, grabbed the details before they were removed.
Many of the new features help customers edit and share documents in real time. Here’s a list of the features highlighted in the Office Blogs post.
- “Real Time Presence in Word:” This lets you see where other people are editing your document in real time. For now this feature is only available through OneDrive for Business but will be more available in the near future.
- “Simplified File Sharing:” You can now share documents by simply clicking ‘Share’ on the Ribbon. When you click share Office saves your file to the cloud and other people can edit, review, and comment on it.
- “Insights for Office (currently in Word and Outlook):” We’ve seen this feature shown off before but it’s now available in Word and Outlook after this update. You can highlight words and “contextual information” results powered by Bing appear in the Task pane.
- “Version History Improvements:” It’s now easier to find various versions of the same file that have been stored on SharePoint of OneDrive for Business. In File there’s a History command that lets you view or restore previous versions.
- “Tell Me in Outlook:” This feature is already available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel and now makes its way into Outlook. It lets you type in natural language to do tasks within Office. The example they give is typing “mark an e-mail as unread into the tell me box and Outlook performing that task for you.
In addition to those outlined features, there are updates listed to Power Pivot, grammar checkers, and more. We haven’t seen the update arrive on our Office 2016 preview yet so we’ll have to wait and see when or if the update rolls out.
There are over one million users in the Office 2016 Preview program and users can still join the preview program on Office’s website.
