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

[maestroX]

Same here. Office 2003 is office finished, save for the bugs.

Re:Moar Cloud

[OhPlz]

Recurring Revenue Edition.

Re:Moar Cloud

[thunderbird32]

MUCH easier to make a pivot table than request a Cognos report be built. In a company with a 3 man IT department (such as ours), you've got to prioritize. If the users can make their own pivot tables, it saves everybody a lot of headache.

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.

Re:Moar Cloud

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I like Office 2010. I actually like Ribbon, once getting over the learning curve. I've used some third party companies that implement Ribbon (eg: AutoCAD) that I found terrible.

In addition, I love how Excel 2007+ handles filters. Much easier to import data, and easily filter columns.

For me I haven't upgraded past Office 2010 for two reasons:
1) We use 2010 at work, so home-work consistency is a consideration
2) Microsoft is pushing subscription based 365 so hard, they limit some features in 2013, but not 365.

Re:Moar Cloud

[Gadget_Guy]

You're missing out on Excel pivot tables. That is one hell of a big selling point for versions >= 2007.

Microsoft Excel introduced pivot tables in version 5.0 released in 1995. So yes they do keep making improvements pivot tables in each version (up to and including Power Pivots as an add-on for 2010 and included in 2013), but no you do "miss out" on pivot tables at all.

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.

Re: I thought office 365 was going to be the last

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

I'd just be happy with...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I'd just be happy with an announcement that the online Office 365 apps would finally get the features they need to quit making them toys (and forcing everyone to download docs to local Office apps anyway).

Second to that would be an option in Office 365 to default to "yes, when I opened the document, put me in f***ing editing mode by default." Hell, call it the "Google Docs" mode if you want.

Clutter tool

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Microsoft spokesperson T. Ruth Teller said, "We moved menu items around using the ribbon in Vista. The drudgery of regular work was replaced by the adventure of searching 'where is the font menu hiding today'. Not to rest on our laurels, we scrambled the start menu items when we introduced Windows 7, then took the start menu away in Windows 8. Brought it back in windows 9, but not exactly. Now not to stop with stuff we put in the interface, we have decided to play hide and seek with the stuff you put in the document. What happened to the intern's acceptance email, why the CEO's form email prominently displayed and my boss's email thread about my vacation plan gone? You will get lots and lots opportunity ponder such things in the new release".

She continued further, "Using Microsoft product means you save so much on retraining you employees on the office products they use daily. All the years of experience will continue to pay off".

Re:Windows 7 eol

[Dutch Gun]

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).

Still the "best" office suite.

[etinin]

It may be a little tragic. Microsoft, may be hated, but it's still by far the best (or standard) office suite. We should actually be happy they're still selling the old standalone office without price hikes (Adobe don't seem to be doing that anymore with the Creative Suite). Heck, now they're freely offering almost fully functional multiplataform versions of office for phones and tablets. Nowadays, it's actually believable that some day they may actually release a working Office Suite for Linux.

Sure you can use Open/Libre Office and be happy with it for several purposes, but the small incompatibilities are surely gonna cause you serious trouble once you can't see properly the documents you need. Even iWork, actively developed by what is now the world's biggest private company, eventually gets broken by something and eventually many users install Office for their needs. For work or study purposes involving constant document exchange with users which you can't garantee will use the same tool as you, I still see dropping Office as no go, and it may be ever so. It's just like image editing: Gimp works fine for most personal projects but if you do it for a living, unless you're lucky and find an opensource haven nobody is gonna hire you don't use Adobe tools.

You're not coerced into using any of the optional cloud features if you don't want to give Microsoft your data. I for one, got one free office 365 license with a new computer and one from work, and the desktop version still works fine and, except for the 1TB onedrive which is useful, I haven't moved on and used it because I prefer the standalone version, and besides frequent upgrades which I will obviously miss, even some quite good cloud integration is available trough the bundled onedrive if that's your thing. Also, all questioning that sould sincerely check if their questioning behaviour with their Android or iOS phones is similar, which would surely make the complaints rational questioning of a huge powerful corporation, or whether it's just hate of Microsoft and love of Google or Apple, which have been doing much worse than Redmond.