The fascination and utility of cloud-based services continue unabated for individuals and organizations looking to cut down on work time and increase productivity. Perhaps nowhere is this embodied better than in Microsoft’s Office 365 platform, which bundles all the utility and features of Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other Microsoft favorites into one data management center. July saw Microsoft rollout an update to this universally-popular data manager, which contains new features, such as Researcher and Editor in Word, which is seeing the most updates overall.

Updates for Word

As indicated above, Researcher and Editor are two new features that come with the July 2016 update. Researcher will help users gain access to an expanded body of resource material such as science, health, history, and educational sources. Researcher will also be available on mobile devices. An apt complement to the Researcher app getting you started on completing a paper, Editor helps you finish it up. Editor will build on the Spellchecker and Thesaurus functions, and give users additional colored lines to indicate suggested changes. Microsoft has promised to develop Editor over time to get it beyond just editing “for clarity” and be a more multi-dimensional tool.

New Features for PowerPoint

Add to last November’s updates to PowerPoint – Designer and Morph – a feature called Zoom, which lets users create “interactive, non-linear presentations”. The idea is to get rid of the linear method of presenting slides and allow presenters to display each slide in whatever order is needed, without having to interrupt the normal course of presentation.

New for Outlook

To the relief of many, Outlook is getting some needed upgrades, namely in the Focused Inbox feature, which has already been available for iOS and Android for a while now. Focused Inbox separates the important wheat from the unwanted chaff utilizing two tabs that divide incoming mails by importance or category. The new Outlook feature will also adjust over time to better prioritize your mail according to your actions.

Although Microsoft hasn’t set a release date for these new added features, Outlook 365 and that for PC and Mac are all receiving @mentions, which makes it far easier to locate mails that require users’ attention. This feature allows you to type the @ symbol and the desired recipient or contact, which prioritizes that person by highlighting their name and adding their email address to the To: line.

Questions About Office 365?

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