14 DAY TRIAL // Office 2016 is projected to hit the shelves later this year, but a preview build already allows those interested to see what’s new in the overhauled productivity suite, and today Microsoft has revealed that no less than 1 million users have already done that since its release one month ago.
And since the success of Office 2016 on Windows Preview is so impressive, the company has rolled out an update to add new features and options for some of the built-in productivity tools.
More collaboration and sharing options
The new Microsoft is all about collaboration, productivity and empowering people to do more, so most of the new apps that the company is rolling out these days come with features focused on these things.
The new Office 2016 Preview update adds real-time presence in Word, which means that you’ll be notified when some of your teammates are making changes to a document in Word. This feature is limited to MS Word for the time being, but expect it to be added to all the other productivity solutions very soon.
“While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon,” Microsoft says.
File sharing has also been improved, so you now have to simply click on the Share button in the Ribbon to save any document to the cloud and then share it with your coworkers.
Insights, a new feature powered by Bing, will also be released for Word and Outlook users, so you can get contextual information from the web right in your document whenever you select keywords.
And last but not least, the new update brings version history improvements, allowing you to find older versions of your documents stored on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business.
Office 2016 is projected to launch later this year, so expect many more such updates to see daylight in the coming months, as work on the new productivity suite is advancing at a really fast pace.