Microsoft made a real statement when it released Office 2003 on August' 03. It was a major step up to the way things were done in the business/corporate world. As at then, more companies and offices were succumbing to the demands of the digital age, moving from having typewriters and file cabinets to computers and computer-based storage devices. Microsoft acted quickly and threw in the richest-in-features, most advanced and complete office suite ever known by the corporate world (as at that time).
Fast forward 12years from that time, and they are still wowing us with this amazing software. It's the Office '16 suite, released officially on 22 September, 2015.
Prior to this ( i.e Office '16), we've had '07, '010, and '013 editions with each boasting of its own features and building on the success established by Office' 03.
Office '16 is no exception. New features as well as changes were made here and there. Here are the key features and changes to look out for as you use the suite -
1. Optimised versions of Word and PowerPoint on Windows 10 for Touch devices and Lumia smartphones and part of a new offering called "Office for Windows 10" .
2. In aesthetic sense, the new office apps were given some good 'icon' makeovers. They now have the universal app styling you'll be familiar with for Windows 10 apps. Likewise, there's a touch-centric UI that will look familiar to iPad users.
3. Office 2016 suite boasts a selection of five Office Themes (compared to three with Office 2013), offering a selection of greys (light, medium, dark), white, and a colourful theme which picks up the solid slabs of colour in Windows 10.
4. A smart 'Tell Me' tool which is already available for Office Online and Office for iPad, and offers an assistant to help you perform various tasks.
5. There's also a new Bing-powered feature for Word called Insights, and this looks up background information, websites and news stories for selected words. Track changes, comments and co-editing are available too.
6. Excel equally got it own fair share of the makeover and additions including snap functions and smart scrolling which make tapping in your spreadsheet data an easier process. Improved business intelligence tools now grace Excel 2016, with Power Query being built-in rather than an add-on, and Power View now working with data from OLAP cubes. Working with the slicers that let you swiftly filter tables and Pivot Tables using a touchscreen is also easier in Excel.
7. PowerPoint has a useful range of editing tools. Though some people that got their hands on one of the preview versions complained that it had weaknesses in terms of supported file formats, and the Presenter View not being as useful as they'd hoped.
"it isn't really full-screen, for starters, with the title bar at the top always being present, and the Windows taskbar eating up display real-estate, too" - as one of them was quoted.
A number of good updates have equally being made since the preview period. In no particular order, they include:
- Addition of Insights (powered by Bing) in Office
- Real Time Presence in word
- Improved Power Pivot improvements
- Improved grammar checker
- Simplified file sharing
- Version History improvements
And other minor ones as well.
So, there you have it - the new MS Office 2016 . Obviously it has not become easier than it used to be for those that are still trying to get the hang of it; neither has it become harder for those that are already pros. But, one thing is sure, everyone, one way or the other will use an office suite.Microsoft have made it clear over time that they are in the I.T business for the long run, their Office line of products certainly remains one of the key ways amongst others they're gonna remain dear to us.
#Patrick Ikechukwu.
