There is nothing permanent except change. -Heraclitus
When Microsoft released MS Office 2007 sometime year 2006, most MS Office users were lost with the huge change in the interface as they switched from using the old menus and toolbars with tabs and the ribbon. After Office 2007, comes Office 2010, then Office 2013 with most users not able to catch-up with the changes.
Just before you are able to get used to working with Office 2013 and know every features of it, Microsoft now comes with MS Office 2016 and it is scheduled to be release today (Sept. 22, 2015).
Those who are using Office365 may get notifications already regarding their upgrade options so lets try to have a peek of whats new and interesting with Office 2016.
Real time co-authoring in Word
When you're collaborating on a document, you can see text changes others are making as well as the location of their cursor within the document. Changes are displayed automatically as people use and update the document. This capability will be available when working in documents stored on OneDrive for Business and Office 365 SharePoint sites.
-This is already available in google docs, a great feature to be included in MS Apps.
Tell Me
Tell Me saves you the time you would normally use to look for a specific function within the Ribbon. You can type what you’re looking for in the Tell Me box at the top right corner of the Ribbon in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, and with “word-wheeling”, which enables results as soon as you start typing, every keystroke refines the results so that you can click on what you’re looking for as soon as you see it. For example, when you want to mark your document as confidential, just type “confidential” or “confidential banner” and Tell Me will bring back the “Insert Watermark” command. When you click in the Tell Me box, you'll also see a list of the last five commands you ran from within Tell Me, saving you time getting to the feature you want to use.
-Looks like a widget to me. Will be one of my meds when in Alzheimer mode.
Excel Power Query integration
Microsoft Power Query for Excel, which was a separate downloadable add-in for Excel 2013 and 2010 is now integrated in Excel. Power Query enhances self-service business intelligence (BI) for Excel with an intuitive and consistent experience for discovering, combining, and refining data across a wide variety of sources including relational, structured and semi-structured, OData, Web, Hadoop, Azure Marketplace, and more.
-Lets integrate more add-ins.
Excel forecasting functions
The time series forecasting sheet functions are used to predict future values based on historical data. For example, a monthly timeline with values on the 1st of every month or yearly timeline. For this type of timeline, it’s very useful to aggregate raw detailed data before you apply the forecast, which produces more accurate forecast results as well.
-A crystal ball.
Math input control
Already available in OneNote and Window, math input control is now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can write math equations with a digital pen, a pointing device, or even your finger, and have the ink converted to a “typed” format.
-This has been a problem ever since. We have tons of add ins to do this, finally its included with MS Office.
New chart types
The following new chart types are available. They are particularly good for visualizing financial or hierarchal information and for revealing statistical properties in your data:
- Financial: Waterfall
- Statistical: Histogram, Pareto, Box and Whisker
- Hierarchical: Treemap and Sunburst
Excel data cards
Data cards display rich tabular data for a specific geolocation on mouse hover or selected visual. Users can drill down and surface hidden data during presentation or storytelling. This hidden data may be aggregated data that cannot be shown as an existing visual. For example, a column chart can't show the description for a set of events that occurred at a specific location: such as a list of health violations spanning across a time period at a particular restaurant.
- I thought this is already available with Office 2013.
Use Clutter in Outlook to sort low priority messages
Clutter moves low priority messages out of your Inbox and into their own folder, saving you time when you scan for important messages. Clutter looks at what you've done in the past to determine the messages you’re most likely to ignore. It then moves those messages to a folder in your Inbox called Clutter items. The Clutter items folder will be available regardless of how you access your account. From Outlook desktop, you can access your Clutter folder, configure your clutter experience, and indicate that an individual mail is not clutter.
-Has been in my mail for more than a month but still don't know how to use it.