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.

Comments

Moar Cloud

[JMJimmy]

Whenever I read "more cloud integration" or some other marketing crap like that my immediate thought is "How many people am I going to have to downgrade or switch to an Open alternative?"

Office 2003 is the last Microsoft Office suite I used and I could not be happier with my choice. The writing was on the wall when they went "ribbon" crazy.

Re:Moar Cloud

[WheezyJoe]

That Ribbon was most likely introduced simply to distinguish the look and feel from free Office apps, particularly Open/LibreOffice. That's right, I think it's more marketing gimmick than UI innovation. It's not completely hideous - the Ribbon can be hidden, after all. What sucks about 2007 onward is what they TOOK AWAY from 2003. Yes, the toolbars could get messy under 2003, but that's because they were so customizable. Office 2003 even came with a little icon editor to make your own buttons and assign them to macros. That's gone in 2007 and onward; only the most rudimentary customizations are possible with the new Office, which you need if you use anything beyond the basics.

Office 2003 is at end-of-life, and our IT staff is forcing us to Office 2010. Our workflow depends on a lot of macros, however, which in the past we trivially assigned to custom buttons or pull-downs in 2003 toolbars. Very difficult, or simply not possible, to do in 2007 onward (requires, at least, custom tools, XML editing, and hooks in VB, just to put a custom icon on a ribbon). There's a lot of gnashing of teeth on the Internet from workplaces trying to regain the functionality that was so trivial under 2003.

Office became popular because they nearly gave it away with new PC's back in the Pentium/Windows NT days. It stayed popular because for all its security flaws, VB for Office made the software customizable enough to become essential to any office out there, be it your dentist or the Citibank trading floor. Microsoft lost sight of that with 2007 and the Ribbon Revolution, citing weird focus groups getting hung up on one thing or another to justify a complete UI overhaul, but until now companies like ours could just simply stick with 2003 and get our work done.

For all the faults of Microsoft's products, the saving grace was they were typically so customizable your could bend it into something you could tolerate, or even like. The "new" Microsoft that came along about the time of the Ribbon is going the opposite direction... Windows and Office are less user-customizable with each release, Windows 10 being no exception. This kinda sucks, and I don't see any end to it.

Cloud integration and security

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is far more integration with cloud, allowing a user to access documents anywhere, and Outlook now syncs with OneDrive when sending large files."

Access documents how? Can they save them anywhere they want? Do I really want to open access to OneDrive for attachments?

Too many security questions when it comes to these cloud features. And too many stupid users to allow them unfettered access to company information. I wish that owner's son could grasp that concept.