Despite being the most widely used productivity tool, Microsoft Office has been under pressure from cloud-based services like Google Docs lately. Office 2016, which arrives with key focus on cloud collaboration, aims to tackle this crisis.
Office has been the ‘go to platform’ for many and here are the four prominent changes:
Real-time co-authoring: Real-time authoring allows two or more people to collaborate in real-time on a Microsoft Word document and complete their work. While this thing existed on Office online for sometime, Microsoft is bringing the feature to desktop apps for the first time with the new release. The best use case scenario would be a project or research work where two or more people can author their individual parts at the same time without requiring a person to edit and send back the document.
Tell Me: In general, Office is a giant productivity tool with some features one may not discover at all but what if you want to do something and don’t know from where to start. Tell Me is at your disposal. In simple words, Tell Me is an intelligent assistant (not Cortana) to help you quickly find the right Office feature or command within the app. Power users, Alt+Q is the new shortcut to remember.
Smart Lookup: Say you are reading a book on Kindle and are stuck at a new word, just selecting the word brings up the dictionary. Smart Lookup is a web built right into Office. Smart Lookup brings insights from the web right into your documents.
Skype built-in: We live in a digital age where communication is the key to everything and now Microsoft is bringing Skype directly to Office in order to help users communicate with collaborators right within the app. While Skype is the default service right now, Microsoft will be handing out APIs to help other communication platforms extend their service to Office users.
With Office 2016, your documents can travel with you across devices and the most recently used documents list allows users to pick up right where they left.
