Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features (networkworld.com)

New submitter Miche67 writes: As part of the July 2016 update to Office 365, Microsoft is adding several features across the board to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word, however, is getting the biggest new features -- Researcher and Editor -- to improve your writing. "As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document," reports Network World. "[Editor] builds on the already-existing spellchecker and thesaurus to offer suggestions on how to improve your overall writing. In addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and the wavy blue line under bad grammar, there will be a gold line for writing style." The new features are expected to be available later this year. In addition to the two new features added to PowerPoint last year -- Designer and Morph, Microsoft is offering Zoom, a feature that lets you easily create "interactive, non-linear presentations." "Instead of the 1-2-3-4 linear method of presenting slides, forcing you to place them all in the order you wish to display, presenters will be able to show their slides in any order they want at any time," reports Network World. "This way you can change your presentation order as needed without having to stop PowerPoint or interrupt the display." As for Outlook, Focused Inbox is coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs. The "Focused" tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the "Other" tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly. In addition, @mentions are coming to Outlook 365 and Outlook for PC and Mac, "making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others."

Comments

So in other Words,

[The Real Dr John]

they didn't add any new useful features except to force more searches through Bing.

Re:So in other Words,

[msauve]

It's all clueless hype.

The "Focused" tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the "Other" tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly.

That's a non-sequitur. High priority emails are those with a Priority:urgent header. There's nothing to learn, it's a simple, straightforward rule, which has been done for decades by any decent MUA. If they're doing something different, they shouldn't call it "priority.'

Re:So in other Words,

[ShaunC]

Moreover, most MUAs can be set to ignore the X-Priority, X-MSMail-Priority, etc. headers altogether. Everyone's email looks the same to me, so a few times a year I get to take an angry call from someone asking why I haven't replied to their urgent priority message yet. Sorry, but "Subject: data export for October" isn't as urgent as you think it is, and the guy who sent "Subject: Utility work at Chicago datacenter tomorrow" with a normal priority header is actually going to get attention first. Outlook's return receipt feature is another barrel of fun, my client is set not to honor them, which occasionally sends people into a frenzy.

Speaking of things that have been done well for decades, the @mentions thing doesn't sound like any great shakes either. "Making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others" sounds a lot like CC'ing people to me.

Re:So in other Words,

[morcego]

High priority emails are those with a Priority:urgent header.

Except that most antispam software treats that as a clue it's not really high priority, but spam.

Re:So in other Words,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all clueless hype.

No, it actually is not. And this is from a person who really despises Microsoft and has no intention to upgrade from Windows 7.

That's a non-sequitur. High priority emails are those with a Priority:urgent header. There's nothing to learn, it's a simple, straightforward rule, which has been done for decades by any decent MUA. If they're doing something different, they shouldn't call it "priority.'

The priority you are describing is what the sender of the email is stating.

That sender-stated priority may or may not have nothing at all to do with what you consider to have a high or low priority, which is what the feature is about.

So, the sender's priority may or may not factor in to the overall classification, and will most likely still be able to show up in red or whatever style you wish, but the "Focused" stuff will learn about what you think has high priority and show such emails there.

So, no, it's neither clueless nor a non-sequitur.

Re:So in other Words,

[msauve]

it actually is not.

Yes, it most certainly is. The point flew over your head, you just didn't hear the "whoosh" because of how far over your head it went. "Priority" is a long time, well defined term with regard to email. Everyone does email priority, which makes this PR release hype. Whatever MS is doing, they're wrong to call it "priority."

More crap to turn off

[smooth wombat]

Word rarely does what I want it to do so I've turned off most of the "help". Once we're forced to upgrade to this crap this will be more cruft to disable.

I can't wait to hear from our users when they whine about not being able to get their work done because Word is trying to be "helpful".

Word for Office 365: Revenge of Clippy

Re:More crap to turn off

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can't wait to hear from our users when they whine

Sounds like you're the one whining.

Re:More crap to turn off

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft no longer offers a stand alone retail purchase of "Office" that does not require an online Microsoft account to install or use. Even what you purchase at retail in a store requires a Microsoft online account to install or even to just obtain the actual product key. So we no longer buy it. Office 2010 will be the last version we use.

Our next version of "office" will be Apache Open Office, the low cost Ability Office (which has enough features for us), or even Word Perfect/Quattro Pro (from Corel, who amazingly hasn't screwed these up). It will NOT be a Microsoft product.

Re:More crap to turn off

[chipschap]

AbiWord is surprisingly good for its small size.

Re: More crap to turn off

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really going to use abandoware instead of Libreoffice?

Re: More crap to turn off

[pthfdr]

Yes. Do you ever wondered why LibreOffice occupies 100MiB+ of your precious hard disk space,and all you want to do is to just write a document? At least The documents produced by Word for DOS can still be read by those modern bloatware.

Re:More crap to turn off

[Big Hairy Ian]

As if MS Word wasn't already counter intuitive enough

Re: More crap to turn off

[Anonymous Coward]

All I really need is a damn spell checker in WordPad... but NOOOOOOOO that would kill Office sales for home users, so Microsoft would never, ever even consider such a thing. THIRTY FUCKING YEARS of Windows, and Write/WordPad has never had the simple feature of a spell checker.

Re: More crap to turn off

[TheFakeTimCook]

All I really need is a damn spell checker in WordPad...

No, what you really need is a System-Wide Spell-and-Grammar-Checker, Dictionary and Thesaurus Service, like macOS has had since OS X 10.0.0 .

365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

These new features are a joke. I write my own documents. I don't need Clippy 2.0 telling me how I'm writing and where to source my thoughts from.

Office had all the function you needed back in Office 2000. All the later versions have added nothing of value. These new "features" are Microsoft grasping at straws, trying to get the majority who ignored its subscription Kool Aid to take a cup.

Dvorak on why Adobe's subscription models works, and Microsoft's doesn't: Adobe adds features people wants. Microsoft piles on useless crap no one cares about. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[chipschap]

Office had all the function you needed back in Office 2000.

I could argue (at least up to a point) that WordStar 5.5 had everything you need for, you know, writing. And once you learned the key patterns, which made eminent sense in terms of finger motions, using a mouse would just slow you down (a lot). Try using Word without frequently lifting your hand off the keyboard to grab the mouse.

Word and the rest of MS Office have too much stuff that only adds confusion and bloat.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[ShanghaiBill]

I could argue (at least up to a point) that WordStar 5.5 had everything you need for, you know, writing.

Not at all. By far the hardest part of writing is thinking of something to say. Wordstar didn't help with that. But Bing-enhanced Word-365 can actually help you create the content. This is especially useful when you have no opinion or knowledge about the subject, such as writing a school term paper.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[chipschap]

You're saying that Bing searches, embedded in Word, help you write? I suppose they help you do research, which you can do equally well in your web browser. About the only thing special here is the citation feature. Embedded research isn't new; Google Docs has it, for one.

But yes, what to write is one of the hardest parts of writing. I'd argue that a word processor's role is to write your words down, not do research. It's the Unix philosophy: have a tool do one thing and do it well.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[chipschap]

I have to add that Emacs has had comprehensive web lookup since at least 2011 (the xah-lookup package). Your choice of Wikipedia, Google, and six different dictionaries, but surprisingly(!) the package maintainer didn't include Bing search.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

What a crock of shit. If you're doign a term paper you're supposed to do some research yourself so, you know, you get to understand something about what it is you're writing about.

Having some "clippified" search tool start suggesting crap is utter bollocks and just teaches you to be spoon fed. This is actually counter productive to producing a term paper as you are learning nothing.

Microsoft have totally lost the plot now. It's only a matter of time before they're just a footnote in history.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have nothing to say, why do you have your word processor open?

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of fuzzy concept--Ansel Adams

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

With the Azure powered recurrent neural network in the next update, you can write like a Shakes Spear just about anything you don't know already!

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[The-Ixian]

The nice thing about MS products and Windows itself is that there are keyboard shortcuts for nearly every function.

I don't often use my mouse when in Office apps. Even in Windows, I use the keyboard as much as possible.

I guess it just depends on how much you are willing to learn. The mouse is for beginners.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[TheFakeTimCook]

The mouse is for beginners.

Oh Yeah? Let's see you run Photoshop from a Command-Line.

Grow up.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

You really didn't understand what the previous poster was saying did you? The MS hand holding features are targeted to users like you. Since day one nobody has ever needed all of the functionality included in MS Office but people do use some of the esoteric functions. Do you think MS should create personalized versions?

And the command line is overrated because 99% of users do not know about it or use it. The command line is a tool for system administrators and developers.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Agripa]

I actually preferred WordStar 3.31 to the later versions. And running on the 8-bit CP/M systems of the time, it was *still* faster than Word running on a modern system.

Re:365 = You pay for it 365 days of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

very good Technewssources News

Woah, non-linear PowerPoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it's almost caught up with Hyper-Card.

Re:Woah, non-linear PowerPoint

[TheFakeTimCook]

Now it's almost caught up with Hyper-Card.

A moment of silence for one of the greatest missed-opportunities of all time...

Non-linear Presentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever the fuck that means.
What, are people trying to make games in PowerPoint now?
The whole point of a presentation is to get an idea across, not to give people what they want. Those fuckers can go watch a movie.

Re:Non-linear Presentation

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>>>> Non-linear Presentation
>> Whatever the fuck that means.

It's a new feature that allows the audience to read whatever they want into your presentation. Very popular, I would imagine.

Re:Non-linear Presentation

[chispito]

Whatever the fuck that means. What, are people trying to make games in PowerPoint now?

Choose-Your-Own-Presentation. While most people prefer the Edward Packard slide decks, R. A. Montgomery does have a substantial following in the board room circuit.

Re:Non-linear Presentation

[by (1706743)]

In a nonlinear world, I might be the OP of this thread!

Re:Non-linear Presentation

[TheRaven64]

It's very useful to be able to create presentations with multiple paths through them. You can embed deep-dives into things that you're trying to explain and skip over them if the audience either isn't interested in that part or that they want more information about. Quite a few other presentation tools provide support for non-linear presentations, PowerPoint is playing catchup.

Oh $DEITY, Have Pity on Me!

[namgge]

The only good thing about PowerPoint was that it forced people to think about what they were going to say and in what order.

Re:Oh $DEITY, Have Pity on Me!

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> PowerPoint was that it forced people to think about what they were going to say and in what order

Have you ever BEEN to a PowerPoint presentation?

Re:Oh $DEITY, Have Pity on Me!

[ShanghaiBill]

The only good thing about PowerPoint was that it forced people to think about what they were going to say and in what order.

Exactly. If Abraham Lincoln had Powerpoint, the Gettysburg Address could have looked like this.

Re:Oh $DEITY, Have Pity on Me!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The only good thing about PowerPoint was that it forced people to think about what they were going to say and in what order.

Too funny! I'm gonna print this out and frame it, that's how funny it is.

Revenge of Clippy

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Researcher and Editor

which was codenamed "Clippy", right?

LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose this confirms LibreOffice has almost caught up in the interoperaton stakes.
MS had to introduce new incompatability features.

Re:LibreOffice

[aaarrrgggh]

My Office 2008 has a couple incompatibility "features" with the version the rest of my office is using... So I decided to try Libre Office again. It has gotten pretty good, although there are a few things I find mildly annoying. Just might switch the office over to it, no real reason at this point not to, at least from what I see today.

Reinforced Writing

[Anonymous Coward]

Clippy: "Nervous?"
User: "Yes, I don't like this."
Clippy: "You only have 75 more lines to go. Okay, what's this one?"
User: "Couple of wavy lines."
Clippy: "Sorry, this isn't your lucky day!"
*Clippy shocks the User*

News for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

This article reads more like an advertisement.

Office 2K

[antdude]

I am still using it even though rarely. It works well for me. Better compatibility than the non-MS Office softwares.

Re:Word up

[by (1706743)]

Far be it from me to "defend" word (a plain text editor and TeX is more my style), but do really blame the programmers for the bulk of Word's shortcomings? I suspect it wasn't a programmer who said, "hey, let's have a talking paperclip!"

If it's buggy and crashing all the time, then it's poor programming, poor QA, or unrealistic timeframes set by the higher-ups. If it's the features that are completely useless and laughable, then I wouldn't be blaming the programmers. But that's just me...

Cut 'n Paste

[Kernel Krumpit]

How I wish that I could Cut & Paste what I wanted to quickly and easily - just like in the old days. Cutting text in Word is - always - a nightmare and it's suggestions are - always - less than helpful. I agree let's go back to the functionality of the 2000/3 version. Thank Buddha I still have a couple of versions installed. Word 'functionality' is an oxy... If you've ever tried to get anything done with Tables or moving text round then it's taken you way longer than it used to.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If you've ever tried to get anything done with Tables or moving text round then it's taken you way longer than it used to.

Me: "I want to move this paragraph a little to the left."
Word: "No, I'm going to fuck up the entire document instead."

Me: "Insert an extra-indented bullet point here."
Word: "Excuse me while I ruin all your formatting and renumber everything from the start of your thesis."

Me: "Remove this line from the Table Of Contents."
Word: "HEY! Look at all the extra shit I found and slammed into the Table Of Contents!"

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[BurningFeetMan]

I have never rage quit anything as hard as when I rage quit MS Word during my picture heavy study assignment the other day. It's all a bit of a blur now, but I distinctly remember the hate, the absolute hate I had for all things Microsoft after it complete fucked my assignment. Hours were lost. :( But, from every down there's an up. That day I gave up on Word for ever, my friends reminded me that I had Powerpoint installed, and needless to say that all my assignments are done, rightly or wrongly, in Powerpoint... and I can put my photo's where ever the fuck I want.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[AthanasiusKircher]

And this is what we get when somebody tries to use a word processor for complex document layout. This is what's behind all the bloat in Word: people using the wrong tool for the job.

I know people do it all the time, but that doesn't mean it ever made sense. Typesetting and layout should be mostly independent of content creation. When you try to combine the two dynamically, this kind of crap is just bound to happen.

You want to do layout and actual decent typography? Use a tool designed for it. InDesign works. LaTeX is good.

Or heck, learn how to use styles and proper global formatting settings in Word, rather than direct formatting hacks everywhere... And suddenly a lot of this crap won't happen.

(P.S. I hate Word with a passion and rarely use it except when forced to. And Word is buggy. But if this stuff happens too often, it's likely also because you're trying to do things like you're still using a typewriter instead of the right features or even the right software application.)

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The bludgeon with which Microsoft killed all its competition was a killer feature called WYSIWYG. It integrated formatting with content with ridiculous things like the default printer. Change the printer and suddenly all the fonts not supported by the printer will be replaced by some other supported font. All the managers who are still in Microsoft have been promoted to positions way beyond their competence and they all worship at the altar of WYSISWYG, the God that delivered them de-facto monopoly. They all believe they have offended their God and that is why they are getting thulpped and schlupped and run circles around in the market place. And then continue to do chicken sacrifices and breaking 108 coconuts hoping their God will be pacified and will shower them with bounty once again.

They took HTML designed to from ground up to separate content from formatting, with graceful degradation of performance on less powerful hardware as the design goal. And slapped it, and whipped it into submission to make Word document display exactly as it is in HTML.

The damage Microsoft has done to computing will take decades to reverse.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[MightyYar]

Word makes it difficult sometimes to use it as a word processor. In particular, I find it's implementation of styles somewhat clunky and it is painful to create and manage tables, figures, and pictures. The fields also have odd behavior that hasn't been updated in decades. They keep bolting stuff on, but not fixing the underlying warts - presumably for compatibility. The result is several different "layers" on the document, with a combination of new and old objects that you can stick on various layers, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. There are several ways to do a text box, for instance, and each are edited through a completely separate workflow.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[Anonymous Coward]

it's likely also because you're trying to do things like you're still using a typewriter instead of the right features or even the right software application.)

Word processing applications could benefit from redesign. User style suggestions would create a set of constraints which combined with document formatting and typography conventions would let the application optimize the final look and ask advice from the user when in doubt for additional constraints. It would be like a lazy LaTeX /union WYSIWYG word processor.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[Anonymous Coward]

After years of unwillingly using Word, I still have trouble deleting a table without breaking everything. I know how, but it nevers comes naturally. I've never heard of anyone who got in on their first time. Thoug I think they finally fixed that in the latest version.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

And this is what we get when somebody tries to use a word processor for complex document layout.

I couldn't agree more, but Microsoft promotes Word as a tool that can do all of these things. Look at any of their promo stuff and it shows Word being used as a layout tool, a graphics design tool, etc etc.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how it starts...The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men... cruel.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found so much of the rage surrounding Word is because very few people learn how to use Styles. Styles are integral to making a document that doesn't go mad and put stuff where you don't want it.

Re:Cut 'n Paste

[Anonymous Coward]

Right click on the text box, Properties, Wrap Text, "Through".
Then the layers stop pushing each other and allow themselves to get close to each other, or touch,
But yeah hella problem otherwise.

Focused Inbox?

[Thu Anon Coward]

it's a turd. if you have multiple email inboxes, not a single one of them can be primary, even though that was the way the old Hotmail app worked. you either have "ALL email" or "Focused Inbox". I don't want a fucking Focused Inbox, I want the software to do what I goddamn tell it to.

I have an Android phone and I kept tearing M$ support a new asshole everytime they wanted my opinion on the Outlook app. At one point they actually invited me to be a Beta tester, I said "Why should I test drive your shit for free?" . And it was shit, it really was. Because the name of the Beta was dogfood, and I had told them weeks before that their micro-cephalic developers didn't even eat their own dogfood. I told them the name of the Beta was perfect because what comes out at the other end? DOGSHIT! just like any product that M$ developers work on!

I think Leo Getz said it best:

Leo Getz: They FUCK YOU at the drive-thru, okay? They FUCK YOU at the drive-thru! They know you're gonna be miles away before you find out you got fucked! They know you're not gonna turn around and go back, they don't care. So who gets fucked? Ol' Leo Getz! Okay, sure! I don't give a fuck! I'm not eating this tuna, okay?

Leo Getz: They fuck you with cell phones. That's what it is. They're fuckin' you with the cell phone. They love it when you get cut off. Y'know why, huh? You know why? 'Cause when you call back - -which they know you're gonna do. - -they charge you for that fuckin' first minute again at that high rate.

Leo Getz: They fuck ya, they fuck ya, they fuck ya! (he was probably talking about Microshit here)

And a totally new error message

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 365 will send a brand new message directly to your printer, too!

"PC LOAD LETTER" What does that even mean? refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok

Re:And a totally new error message

[Z00L00K]

Completely useless format, I use the ISO A4 format.

Zoom

[Trogre]

As in the video conferencing software that has pretty much replaced Skype in academia and business?

Or another Zoom?

Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, every new feature thats in the cloud Office means that your documents will be less compatible with humans running non-cloud office... it's like the black plague and your documents are the rats.

Does outlook now sync with Google calendar / Andro

[brasselv]

you know, without hacks, 3rd party synchronizers, gapps subscription, etc etc.
just painless straightforward two way synchronization like almost any other calendar client does.

genuinely interested to know if it works. last time I checked it was a nightmare.

What about Excel?

[jon3k]

Is Excel still a useless shell of the desktop client with no live collaboration that Google has had for the past 10 years?

Re:What about Excel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep up with the times old-timer. Sheets is a toy compared to Excel.

Re:What about Excel?

[aaarrrgggh]

Sheets was far behind a year or two, but what do you think it can't do today? Pivot tables, filters, formatting are all comparable, and some of the formula building stuff is actually better.

Re:What about Excel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel really needs some more work. Box plots, for example.
The data science class I just took had to use many extra tools, and even started teaching R, because Excel isn't able to handle some basic functions.

Re:What about Excel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Excel still a useless shell of the desktop client with no live collaboration that Google has had for the past 10 years?

Useless shell? Behind all those corporate multi-million dollar ERP systems sits one tool to rule them all.

MS Excel is still very much the beating heart of Accounting departments everywhere. Go ahead and take it away to prove me wrong. I dare you.

Re:What about Excel?

[MightyYar]

I'm torn on this... Excel is so abused by engineers already, I'm not sure I want too many more engineering-friendly features added. Python, R, MATLAB, JMP... please, just use another tool. The other solutions are not quick and dirty, and sometimes quick and dirty is all you need - but good lord, know when to move on to another tool. We have an abortion of an Excel sheet that does data collection, including ftp and telnet, and then tries to manipulate the resulting huge data sets. I blame MS for removing the row and column limits that used to nip such silliness in the bud. :)

Fix the MAC version first

[Anonymous Coward]

before adding more useless features.

We MAC users deserve better.
I though life couldn't get more miserable with Microsoft.

The whole Office suite on MAC is horrible with all it's quirks, bugs and crashes.
And nowhere to go to report any serious issues.

Most horrendous bug : online subscription check fails and Excel starts accessing all internal and network drives looking for something for each operation you perform.

Re:Fix the MAC version first

[aaarrrgggh]

Try Libre Office. Only been a week or two since I started using it again, but it definitely does the job for me.

Re:Fix the MAC version first

[Anonymous Coward]

For really simple things, I do use LO. Many of the short articles I write are done in LO.

For the books I write, I make heavy use of Word. Why? Because when you learn the workflow of Word, LO just doesn't do it. LO does not (as far as I have been able to find) even have many of the work-flow tools I rely on.

My current book is a ~1,200 pages technical manual. It uses a lot of complex formatting, lots of citations, LOTS of pictures, lots of tables, ect. Citation references, figure references, table references, formula references all get used a LOT.

When it comes to chapter tests within the book, referencing answers within the text is easy. That makes generating teacher guides easy.

LO doesn't do that, or if it does, I have yet to find it. Also, how LO handles image formatting really sucks.

Oh, and before people start yelling about stability, please catch up with the times. The only crash I have had of word in the last 2 years was due to a power outage. That resulted in the loss of less than a paragraph. I edit it on my home desktop, my laptop and work desktop using '13 and '16. It doesn't screw up the complex formatting going from one to the other, but then again I make proper use of styles (hint: if you need to reformat a odd paragraph in a specific way that's different from the rest of your document, give it its own style in the document).

Re:Fix the MAC version first

[MightyYar]

My hat's off to you on wrestling Word into that workflow. You are a patient man/woman.

Re:Fix the MAC version first

[Anonymous Coward]

With an older version of Word, 2000 or 2003, it's quite workable because it's so customizable. Train the autocorrect to your (mis)typing style, and you're soon hooked on it. Tailor the toolbars exactly to what you need, even draw your own buttons and bind them to macros of repetitive steps. Microsoft started killing off these features beginning with 2007 and god-awful ribbon. The autocorrect survives, but creating your own buttons and toolbars is now history, sorely missed.

Not yet!

[AndyKron]

Not yet! I'm not done bitching about the last new features!

OHH SUUUUPER FUCKING GAAAAYYYY

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice is cross-platform. Microsoft is US government spyware. hmm

what ever should I do.

distrowatch.com

No, it doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that New Word is what became WordStar 4.0. While I would be ecstatic to have some New Word features (column mode blocks, conditional page breaks), I don't believe it's going to happen.

Almost got fired for @mentions this week

[Anonymous Coward]

I was typing proposed tweets to a supervisor and the @mentions feature is apparently already running on outlook 365 because I wrote the tweet into the email with an @ and then my company name, @mentions autofilled the name with the first match from my contact list which was a company wide list serve and then sent the email to my entire company. All this from the body of the email. I can't wait for more of this, thanks Microsoft!

Re:Does outlook now sync with Google calendar / An

[Gaccm]

Doesn't look like it. The crazy thing is that Windows 10's default mail and calendar apps seamlessly work with Google calendar. Are the codebases really so different that they can't import that feature into Outlook 365?

Re:Word up

[Z00L00K]

Word 2.0c was decent.

Office is obsolent, just like office jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

We are way past the point, when creation of printable office documents was a part of any meaningful job descripiton.

So I get to rent Google-- integration

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like if you're going to spend time researching sources then you can do that in your browser and get better results when not being isolated to just Bing. I guess the fragmented sentence warning fix is a bonus but I still don't think that it's worth "upgrading" for. We really need to be able to modify text size in these comments here too, those quotes need to be at least Heading 2.

Plain text...

[pthfdr]

Every document used to be simple. Every document used to be direct. Every document used to depend on no software. What about now?

Re:Plain text...

[Anonymous Coward]

Either install LibreOffice from whatever Linux distro you are using through the built in software installer for that distro or

If you are using Windows because it came with your PC due to anti-trust jimmyrigging the Retail Contracts you can install LibreOffice from it's website...

Pro-tip: Any software you use in Windows, you should look for a portable version that doesn't install at all. portableapps.com has the trusted stuff. LibreOffice is also there in portable format.

LibreOffice is still normal office software. Microsoft anything and everything is US government spyware. Google is too. Facebook is too.

Office is now total crap

[Anonymous Coward]

The last usable Office version was 2007. Following this it's just been the introduction of more crap after crap. The ribbon... The interface changes... etc. etc. All of it is total crap. And now it's a subscription eh ? Fark that.

My organisation switched to Open Office, then Libre Office, and we've never looked back.

Re:Office is now total crap

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS! ...oh so much this! wish I had mod points for you.

but then what would I know? I had used several word processors of less than stellar quality before I got to what I consider my first REAL word processor, which was WordStar 3.0 running on CP/M. To this day I've not found anything that works much better, not really, and more than a few that are many time worse. I absolutely hated the first versions of Word (for DOS). WordPerfect (DOS) was OK but only because it had the unhide feature so you could see (and fix) the mess of formatting tags that are normally hidden. I hung on to WordStar until it failed the leap to the windows desktop. I switched to WordPerfect (for windows) at that point.

These days I'm using OpenOffice (on Win7 and holding), but I like LibreOffice well enough too. I still have a copy of WordStar 7 that I can run in DOSBox. Kinda handy for getting at some of the old files when I need to. Since modern word processors make lousy text editors I've been using TextPad (windows) and vi/vim (Unix/Linux/BSD) for several decades. I really liked Qedit (DOS) but that ended when I found TextPad (and windows dominated the desktop).

The last thing I would want as a primary tool (or really at all) is Office365 or GoogleDocs. I absolutely fail to comprehend this desire to give up control of data to the "cloud". It's just damn bad security practice! ...just my opinion, and I know it's not one share by very many.

Re:Does outlook now sync with Google calendar / An

[MightyYar]

Excel alone has it's own completely vertically integrated team who maintains their own compiler... doubt that there is much shared code between Excel and the other Office apps, let alone Windows 10.

Copy of Google Docs Feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Docs has had the research feature for a long time. It also had document sharing long before Office 365. Nice to see MS acknowledging great features and copying them.

New bugs, yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now when anyone in our company opens an Excel file from an email attachment they save to their OneDrive folder it crashes Excel. Clap...Clap...Clap.

Re:Word up

[tsqr]

Word 2.0c was decent.

I'll second that. Word 2 and Excel 4, on OS/2.

Search?

[davidshewitt]

The feature I'd like to see in Office is a search bar that finds the button you're looking for on the ribbon.

Re:Search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 2016 already has one.

Bad grammar

[holophrastic]

"the wavy blue line under bad grammar"

I don't see any wavy blue line. Network World doesn't use Word, I surmise.

Re:Bad grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

They took it out. A bunch of features were first REMOVED from Office 2016 without telling anyone, so that they could add them back in as 'improvements' and make people who unsuspectingly purchased Office 2016 now have to additionally pay to subscribe to 365. This included the wavy blue line traditionally found under passive voice. If you have a prior version, go under File-Options-Proofing-and change Grammar to Grammar and Style and you will see it.

Re:Bad grammar

[holophrastic]

Dude, you majorly misunderstood my comment.

Is it just me with this concern?

[JustNiz]

I am concerned that because of the ubiquity or Word/Office, many corporate sheep are already unjustifiably using Microsoft tools as the final arbiter of proper grammar/writing style, and will now start to use them to determine the veracity of all knowledge.
That puts Microsoft in one hell of a powerful position that they have already proven themselves to be far to untrustworthy to actually be in.

Re:Does outlook now sync with Google calendar / An

[brasselv]

Yup, but I doubt it's a "technical issue" anyways...
Plenty of 3rd parties are using the Google Calendar API to update back and forth - so it cannot be rocket science.

More likely that it's a battle of corporate overlords ("do we have more to gain or more to lose, if we allow this?")