Microsoft’s latest version of its Office suite is here, and it has been getting rave reviews. Here’s what you need to know about Office 2016’s capabilities:
1. Collaboration is the killer feature, but it’s not fully baked yet. Microsoft is facing increasing pressure to compete with Google’s own productivity suite, and made improving collaboration between its users a key tenet of Office 2016. Word 2016 shipped with the ability to co-author documents stored in SharePoint or OneDrive live from the desktop version of the app, which is a nifty feature for people who want to all pile in on one document. Microsoft is supposed to bring that capability to more applications, with PowerPoint 2016 being the next to get the co-authoring treatment. Right now, it’s still limited to Word on the desktop.
2. Office apps can tell you (and your users) how to do what you want. As Microsoft has changed, grown and redesigned the Office apps over the years, it has been easy to lose track of key, little-used features that users just know are buried somewhere in there. A new “Tell Me” feature in Office 2016 on Windows lets users search for the feature they’re looking for and access it without having to pick through menus. (On a Mac, people can search for menu options in the Help menu.)
