Microsoft Office 2016 Updated With Collaborative Real Time Presence, Contextual Insights
Microsoft is planning to release a new version of its Office productivity suite, Office 2016, sometime later this year. In the meantime, Microsoft has made available an Office 2016 Public Preview, which is also available for Mac users, and there are a few new features that were just added. One of them is called "Real Time Presence," a technology that ties into Real Time Typing.
What Real Time Presence does is allow you to see not only who is editing a shared document, but where in a document a teammate is making edits. It's a feature that Microsoft says will be available first for OneDrive for Business subscribers, and then more broadly soon.
Another addition is called Insights for Office. Insights gives you contextual information from the web via Bing search -- it's initiated by selecting keyboards, like people or places. When you do that, Insights will pluck relevant data from the web and place it into the Task pane. It's currently available in both Word and Outlook.
Microsoft also said it's simplifying the process of sharing files with others to review, comment, and edit. All you have to do is click Share on the Ribbon and your file will save to the cloud and be available for others.
Finally, Office 2016 will make it easier to find different versions of stored files on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. By clicking the History command in the File menu, you'll be able to view and restore any previous version.
What Real Time Presence does is allow you to see not only who is editing a shared document, but where in a document a teammate is making edits. It's a feature that Microsoft says will be available first for OneDrive for Business subscribers, and then more broadly soon.
Another addition is called Insights for Office. Insights gives you contextual information from the web via Bing search -- it's initiated by selecting keyboards, like people or places. When you do that, Insights will pluck relevant data from the web and place it into the Task pane. It's currently available in both Word and Outlook.
Microsoft also said it's simplifying the process of sharing files with others to review, comment, and edit. All you have to do is click Share on the Ribbon and your file will save to the cloud and be available for others.
Finally, Office 2016 will make it easier to find different versions of stored files on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. By clicking the History command in the File menu, you'll be able to view and restore any previous version.
