The month of February might be shorter than the other months of the year, but it is now coming to a close. That means it is time to turn back and look at all the new features added across the Microsoft 365 experience in the second month of the year 2020. From a new Office app, new inking features and Dark Mode for OneNote on Android, here’s a look at everything that was new for Microsoft 365 in February.
We’ll start first with what’s new across the Microsoft 365 mobile apps, which includes the Office 365 suite. On this front, Microsoft introduced a new Office App for iOS and Android. This app is an all in one Office mobile experience and combines Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and other Microsoft services such as Office Lens and Sticky Notes. In this same area, Microsoft also improved on the OneNote app on Android, so that it supports Dark Mode, and so that the inking experience now has brighter colors, and new pen types, highlighters, and erasers.
Next, there were some updates and new tools in PowerPoint and Visio. In February, Microsoft announced the addition of an updated comments feature in PowerPoint, which will allow users to anchor comments to objects, use @mention notifications, discover and add comments more easily. As for Visio, it was updated with real-time co-authoring on the web experience. This allows users with a compatible plan to co-create and edit diagrams simultaneously. Visio also picked up new integrations with Microsoft Teams, making it easier to allow users to create and share new Visio projects directly from the collaboration service.
As Word is the most popular Microsoft 365 app, we’ll mention it separately. In February, Microsoft improved the speech-to-text experience in Word. It now will be easier to use your voice to create content. A new dictation toolbar, suggestions experience, and support for auto-punctuation will let you speak out your words instead of typing. There are also six new preview languages, ranging from Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese.
Elsewhere in Microsoft 365, some of the other new features included the ability to create custom search results pages for Microsoft Search, and new enterprise branding in Yammer. There also was new support for Yammer eDiscovery in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Finally, IT Admins that take care of Office 365 also picked up some new abilities such as the ability to choose which “What’s new” features are visible to their users.
