Redmond releases new update for Office 2016 preview

Jul 2, 2015 08:34 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just released a new update for Office 2016 Preview, providing users with a bunch of improvements for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, all of which can be tested right now by simply joining the program and registering to download pre-release software.

Scheduled to launch later this year, Office 2016 comes with several improvements as compared to its predecessor, but the most striking change is definitely the addition of a new dark theme that brings the productivity suite in line with the design of Windows 10, which also comes with a dark visual style.

New charts and Insights

Today’s update brings new charts for Microsoft Excel, including Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap, and Sunburst, but also real-time typing in Word to see what others are working on as they make changes to a document.

“To try this, save a document to OneDrive for Business and invite your colleagues to join you in a simultaneous authoring session,” Microsoft explains.

For Excel and PowerPoint users, there’s also the new feature called Insights, which was previously available for Word and Outlook users exclusively. This particular option makes it possible to integrate contextual information from the web into Office documents using Bing, and everything you need to do is right-click a specific word or phrase and hit the option called “smart lookup.”

Other new features that are part of this update are “Tell Me,” which is an assistant that helps you find information on performing certain tasks, but also options to convert hand-written equations to text in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint when using a digital pen, a mouse, or a finger on touch screens.

If you want to download this new preview, you must register here with your Microsoft account to get access to the new release. Keep in mind that this is pre-release software and bugs are very likely.

Microsoft Office 2016 Preview update 2 (4 Images)

Microsoft Office 2016 Preview update 2
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