14 DAY TRIAL // As is also the case for the Windows Insider Program, Microsoft is releasing updates to users participating in the Office Insider effort on a regular basis, and today the company has started rolling out new features as part of the May 2016 feature updates.
In addition to several bug fixes and performance improvements, Office 2016 build 16.0.6965.2051 comes with what Microsoft describes as “more efficient online meetings.”
“In Outlook, you can now pre-load attachments to Skype for Business meetings so that you can get started immediately. The attachments will show up in the meeting window automatically when the first participant joins the meeting,” Microsoft explains.
Improvements to Skype for Business
At the same time, this new update features improvements to Get & Transform for Excel, but also with support for offline messages in Skype for Business. Previously, if you tried to send a message to someone who wasn’t online, all you got was an error reading “this message can’t be delivered,” but starting with this update, your message is actually sent, and you get a prompt saying that “Contact is offline. They’ll get this as a missed message.”
Office Insiders who want to download the update immediately can simply fire up the productivity suite, click on File > Account > Update Options > Update Now. The new build will be automatically downloaded and installed on your Windows computer.
All these features will land in the final version of the Office suite at some point in the future, but it all depends on the feedback that Microsoft receives from insiders.
The Office Insider program is based on the same approach as the WIP, with insiders getting access to early features ahead of everyone else, in exchange for evaluating new features and sending feedback to the company in order to further improve them and correct bugs before the public release takes place.