The 2016 version of Microsoft’s productivity suite includes features for easier collaboration and sharing. Excel gets a boost in power, Outlook streamlines everyday tasks, and most applications help you find the command you need.
The latest version of Microsoft Office includes many new productivity, collaboration, and data analysis features.
Here are just a few of the top new features that I like.
Work Faster with “Tell Me”
The Tell Me box in most applications helps you perform important tasks even if you don’t know how to do something. Rather than using Help or just poking around, you can type what you want to do in this box. Office shows you a list of commands you can use to complete your task. If you have selected something in your document, you will see commands specific to that object. For example, if an image is selected, you will see commands related to images.
Get Quick Answers with Insights
Insights lets you search for information from within Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. Right-click a word or phrase and choose Smart Lookup. Microsoft’s Bing search engine uses what you selected and what’s near the selected text to show you definitions, images, Wikipedia articles, and other related information. This appears right in Office, not in a web browser. You can also access Insights via the Review tab and Tell Me.
Collaborate and Declutter in Outlook
Outlook has a number of new features to help you work more efficiently, collaborate more easily, and manage email overload, including
Fast integration with other Office applications. When you attach an Office document to an email you’re about to send, Outlook shows you a list of the files you worked on most recently. No more hunting through folders for that recent spreadsheet or document you want to email to your colleagues. If it’s a file you worked on is in OneDrive, the file’s icon has a little cloud on it.
Collaboration with work groups. If you use Outlook with Exchange Server, you can set up work groups, which are like powerful distribution lists. Members of a work group can share conversations, calendars, and files. You can choose whether they get messages in their individual inboxes or in a group inbox.
Cleaning up clutter. Some people’s inboxes get very cluttered — someone you know, perhaps? So, if you use Outlook with Exchange Server, Outlook has a new feature called Clutter. It moves low-priority messages into a folder called Clutter. You can define which messages should or should not go to this folder. More than that, though, Clutter looks at what you’ve ignored in the past and moves new, similar messages out of your inbox so you can deal with them later.
New Analysis and Forecasting Features in Excel
Excel has gotten quite a bit more powerful in 2016. New features include:
Pulling in data from almost anywhere. A former add-on called Power Query is now built in to Excel. Power Query can pull data from various sources for analysis, including websites and SQL, Azure, Access, and other databases.
More charting options. Excel also has six new chart types. ◦Box and whisker charts are most commonly used in statistical analysis.
Predicting the future. The new time series forecasting functions can predict future values from historical data. The more data, the better the forecast.
Real-Time Co-Authoring in Word
If several people are working on a Word document that is stored in OneDrive for Business, real-time co-authoring allows multiple users to collaborate, edit, and update simultaneously. Everybody can see what everybody else is doing. They can see changes as they are made and even where cursors are currently placed.
Microsoft plans to include this feature in other Office applications in the future.
Sharing Made Easy
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now have Share buttons at the top right of the window. When you click a Share button, you are prompted to save your file to an online location, such as OneDrive. Then, in a panel on the right side of your window, you can enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the file with or select the addresses from your address book. You can choose whether they can edit the file or just view it.
OneNote notebooks have similar functionality. Instead of a Share button, though, you send the invitations from the File menu (also called Backstage view).
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