Microsoft Office 365 Version 2007 (Build 13029.20200) Preview – The New Features

Microsoft has recently released a new Office preview build for the Current Channel on the Windows desktop, and this time, there are several new features coming to the productivity apps included in the suite.

What you need to know is that this is a preview of the July feature update coming to Office 365 subscribers.

In other words, users who currently own an Office 365 subscription are projected to receive all the changes here in the coming weeks once the testing comes to an end.

Here’s everything you need to know about this new update.

First and foremost, the version of this new build is 2007 (Build 13029.20200). It’s only available for the Current Channel on the Windows desktop.

If you’re part of the Office Insider program, you can install the update from the following path:

• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Outlook

So if you were hoping for improvements for Microsoft Word or a different app, you need to wait one more month for it.

First and foremost, let’s see what’s new for Microsoft Excel users.

Microsoft is introducing a new Sheet View in Excel, which makes it possible for users to sort and filter data in the spreadsheet when collaborating with other users. The main highlight of this new feature is that the sorting and filtering that you make in the document do not affect others and the other way around, so when you’re co-authoring a document, you’re the only one seeing these view changes.

The July update also comes with a LET function that provides users with additional controls over formulas. Microsoft explains:

“The LET function allows you to name, and then use a calculation or value in your formulas, and increase both readability (by giving context to others) and performance (by reducing the number of times an expression is calculated). It’s names but on a formula level.”

Additionally, Excel is getting speed improvements for SUMIFS functions, as Microsoft has changed the way they work in order to let them create an internal cached index for a column range. The company says the improvements are significant, to say the least.

“For example calculating 1200 SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS, and COUNTIFS formulas aggregating data from 1 million cells on a 4 core 2 GHz CPU that took 20 seconds to calculate using Excel 2010, now takes 8 seconds only, on Excel M365 2006,” the company explains.

As far as PowerPoint users are concerned, there’s just one addition this month, and it includes faster playback for Microsoft Stream videos.

The company hasn’t detailed how exactly it made the whole thing faster, but it says that the playback of Stream videos that are part of the presentations is now significantly improved after installing the July update.

Outlook is getting some love this month too, and the first thing you’ll notice is an option to create polls, collect votes, and view results right in an email.

Furthermore, you can now disable mentions much faster with a dedicated checkbox in the Send Messages screen, and store your signatures in the cloud for better sync across Windows devices. Note that this feature only works with Outlook for Windows.

And last but not least, Microsoft Outlook is getting a new cloud tool that allows users to store and retrieve settings from the cloud. This makes setting up a new Windows device much faster, as everything is stored in the cloud and the process overall is substantially more straightforward.