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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."
they didn't add any new useful features except to force more searches through Bing.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Now it's almost caught up with Hyper-Card.
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.
The only good thing about PowerPoint was that it forced people to think about what they were going to say and in what order.
>> Researcher and Editor
which was codenamed "Clippy", right?
>>>> 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.
I suppose this confirms LibreOffice has almost caught up in the interoperaton stakes.
MS had to introduce new incompatability features.
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.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I am still using it even though rarely. It works well for me. Better compatibility than the non-MS Office softwares.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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...
In a nonlinear world, I might be the OP of this thread!
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.
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.
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
As in the video conferencing software that has pretty much replaced Skype in academia and business?
Or another Zoom?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
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.
Not yet! I'm not done bitching about the last new features!
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.
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.
Try Libre Office. Only been a week or two since I started using it again, but it definitely does the job for me.
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?
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Completely useless format, I use the ISO A4 format.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Word 2.0c was decent.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Every document used to be simple. Every document used to be direct. Every document used to depend on no software. What about now?
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.
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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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My hat's off to you on wrestling Word into that workflow. You are a patient man/woman.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Word 2.0c was decent.
I'll second that. Word 2 and Excel 4, on OS/2.
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.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The feature I'd like to see in Office is a search bar that finds the button you're looking for on the ribbon.
"the wavy blue line under bad grammar"
I don't see any wavy blue line. Network World doesn't use Word, I surmise.
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.
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?")
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
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.