Revealed: Details For New Office 365 Features
If you can remember back to the late ‘70’s, you might recall how widely popular spellchecking technology became. At the time, there was no way to quickly check your spelling without consulting a dictionary. This new technology became a lifesaver for many people using word processors- saving time and therefore money. You may be wondering, “What does this have to do with Office 365?”
It’s simple:
New technological features continue to transform the way we work, saving us both time and money. Fast forward to today and chances are you’re still using spellchecker or “autocorrect”. Some technology stands the test of time and can last decades - the same goes with Office 365’s new upgrade, which will introduce new features you’ll probably still be using years from now. So without further ado, let’s take a look at what Microsoft has in store for you.
WORD
Office 365’s new upgrade focuses on cloud-powered intelligent services, designed to maximize productivity while saving time. Office 365’s upgrade wouldn’t be an upgrade if there were nothing new in Word, the business application that put Microsoft on the map. To that end, Word is getting two new features: Researcher and Editor.
As you may have guessed, Researcher is designed to help you find reliable sources of information by using Bing’s Knowledge Graph to help search and then cite sources in your Word document. In the future, Researcher’s body of reference materials will also include sources such as national science and health centers, well-known encyclopedias, and more. The feature will be available on mobile devices too. Pretty revolutionary if you ask me.
Now that you have Researcher to help you start your paper, you can count on Editor to help you finish it. This new feature builds on the existing spellchecker and thesaurus, and in addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and wavy blue line under bad grammar, Editor uses a gold line for suggestions on how to improve your writing. Everyone from college students to business professionals will soon be utilizing this power duo to help make their writing more efficient and effective.
OUTLOOK
As we have already blogged about, the time has come for Office 365’s Outlook to get the Focused Inbox which you might already be utilizing on your iOS or Android devices. For those who are not familiar with Focused Inbox, the feature separates your inbox into two tabs:
- Focused tab- which includes emails that matter most to you- your high priority items.
- “Other” tab- for everything else!
Through these new features, Outlook make it easy to identify email that needs your attention so you never miss anything important. Not only that, but as you move email in or out of the Focused tab, Outlook begins to learn from your behavior and adjusts to your priorities. Pretty cool stuff.
QUICK TIP: You can also flag someone by typing the @ symbol in the body of the email and pick whoever you wish to flag. This will automatically highlight that person’s email and their email address will be added to the To: line. If you are mentioned, the @ symbol will show up in Outlook so you can quickly find all email where you are mentioned.
POWERPOINT
Currently, when making a presentation, you’re forced to use the 1-2-3-4 linear method of showing your slides. The problem? You can’t change your presentation order without having to exit PowerPoint’s slideshow mode- and let’s face it, sometimes you do make mistakes and need to go back or move to a different slide. But thanks to PowerPoint’s new feature, Zoom, you can now present your slides in any order you want at any time without a hiccup.
At this time, Microsoft has not set a release schedule for these new features, but according to Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President for the Office team, you can expect to use them soon enough! We will be sure to post on our SOCial media and inform our clients when these new features become available.
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