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Microsoft Office 2016 Public Preview Released
jones_supa writes: Back in March, Microsoft made Office 2016, the next release of the company's leading office suite, available to IT professionals to test and submit feedback on. At Microsoft's Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella announced that the public preview of Office 2016 has now been released as well. Office 2016 comes with a range of new features that build upon Office 2013. There is far more integration with cloud, allowing a user to access documents anywhere, and Outlook now syncs with OneDrive when sending large files. So called Smart Applications extend the functionality of Office, including Tell Me, a new search tool, and Clutter, which unclutters your inbox based on machine learning. Anyone can start testing the free Office 2016 Preview right now. Just as they have done with Windows 10, Microsoft is receiving open feedback on the product.
Office 365 is the name of the subscription service. The major updates/non-subscription products are still named the same as in the past (Office 365 is currently based on Office 2013).
No, it's apparently compatible with Windows 7 or later. Remember, Office is targeted at business, and most businesses are still using Windows 7, and will be for a considerable time to come.
Microsoft will apparently screw around with consumers by doing things like not back-porting DirectX to older operating systems, but they're not going to risk sales of their bread-and-butter products by unnecessarily tying them to only their newest operating systems.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't consider Windows 10 to be an "OS designed for tablets". I'm a big critic of Windows 8, but Windows 10 has pretty much fixed all that I hated about 8, except for how hideous it looks (IMO).
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Hmm, I have already been using Office 2016 for a few weeks.
That's Softmaker Office 2016 (www.softmaker.com) however, which to me is like an updated Microsoft Office 2003. I don't want to start a flamewar but I hate ribbons. Softmaker gives me regular menus and toolbars and is exceedingly compatible with the Microsoft Office files.