Microsoft just announced the Office 2016 Public Preview, a product version available to the general audience. Office 2016 is the successor of Office 2013. Office 2016 final is expected to be released in the Fall of 2015.
Office 2016 has much more to offer than its predecessor. In this article, we will have a look at the key features and improvements of Office 2016 based on its Public Preview version.
Note: I recently installed Office 2016 Public Preview on an existing machine with Office Professional Plus 2013 and after uninstalling Office 2016, my Office 2013 didn't work.
Connected. Anytime, Anywhere, on Any Device.
Office 2016 is all about connectivity. Office connectivity provides access to documents from anywhere, anytime using OneDrive and other services. By default, documents are stored in your OneDrive cloud account. You can login from any device and your cloud documents are available to you anywhere on any device. The flip side to this is, Office 2016 looks for internet connectivity while working.
Team Collaboration
Office 2016, starting with Word 2016, now supports real-time co-authoring. You can share documents with a team and assign their roles. You can see what user is working on what part of a document, in real-time.
Smarter Office
Office 2016 has smart applications that will help you and guide you to improve your productivity and efficiency.
Tell Me: Tell Me is a new search tool available in Word, PowerPoint and Excel that serves up the commands you need by simply typing what you want to do.
Clutter: Clutter is a new Exchange feature that lights up in Outlook and uses machine learning to analyze your email patterns and de-clutter your inbox by moving lower priority messages out of your way and into a new Clutter folder.
Insights: Insights is powered by Bing, it finds you contextual information from the web within the reading experience.
Multi-factor Authentication
Outlook now supports a multi-factor authentication mechanism via the Active Directory (AD) Authentication Library.
Compliance and Transparency Control
The Microsoft Office team has been working hard to provide a safe, secure and trusted environment for Office users and some of these features have already been implemented on Office 365 including Enhanced Transparency and Security Enhancements. Data Loss Protection is now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. IT admins can centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing. End users will see policy tips or sharing restrictions when the apps detect a potential policy violation.
Data Analysis and Data Modeling.
Excel 2016 is an improved product with new data analysis and data modeling features. Excel's Power BI, Power Pivot, PivotTable and Power Query tools are advanced enough to let users analyze, visualize and provide advanced reporting capabilities.