Microsoft is giving one of its most popular products, Office, a massive update. Office 2016 is coming out in the next week or so and will have plenty of updates and new features.
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This has been an overhaul of the software suite, which offers well-known programs like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and Outlook. You will be able to buy copies of the software in stores and online. If you have a subscription to the software though Microsoft’s Office 365 service, their existing applications will be automatically updated in the coming weeks.
Office 2016 requires Windows 7 or newer, and it's free to new and existing Office 365 subscribers. Office also includes note-taking program OneNote.
Some new features include several "intelligent" tools. Outlook will try to determine how you manage your inbox and automatically organise it for you.
A new search box called Tell Me on PowerPoint, Word and Excel lets you search for a feature, for example "Format" and immediately pulls up the relevant menu.
That saves you from reading through a help article or digging around menus.
Here is what is included in Microsoft Office 2016:
Word gets a new Design tab for applying themes and styles, and an improved navigation pane (replacing Document Map).
Outlook has support for Message Preview (seeing the first line of an email in the list of messages), and Online Archive, a feature of Office 365 Enterprise or Exchange.
Excel has added support for the Analysis Toolpak (a collection of data analysis wizards), PivotTable slicers (buttons for filtering data in a PivotTable report), a Recommended Charts wizard, and an Equation Editor (replacing Office 2011's ancient and separate Microsoft Equation Editor).
Most Excel 2013 functions are now supported. The formula builder has been improved, and print to PDF has been added.
PowerPoint gets an improved Presenter View, support for PowerPoint 2013 transitions, and an enhanced animation pane for managing animations. Saving to a QuickTime movie has been chopped.
OneNote is now bundled with Office, though since Spring 2014 this app has been free on all platforms.
It does seem that Microsoft is working to divide Office into two different parts: full Office on Windows and Mac, and a cut-down version for tablets and phones.