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,

[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: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.