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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
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.
>> 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.
>> 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?
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.
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.
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)
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!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
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.)
The feature I'd like to see in Office is a search bar that finds the button you're looking for on the ribbon.