Office 2016 preview rolls out real-time collaborative typing for Word and more new features

Office desktop
Office desktop (Image credit: Windows Central)

In early May, Microsoft officially launched the first public preview version of Office 2016 for Windows. Now the company has revealed it has added a number of new features to the preview build of its productivity software release during the month of June.

Here's what been added in the last month, which includes real-time collaborative typing for the Word application:

  • New charts in Excel—There has been a lot of enthusiasm for the new charts in Excel we delivered— all based on user feedback. The six new charts include Waterfall (shown), Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap (shown) and Sunburst.
  • Real-time typing in Word—Real-time typing is now in Word! You can see where others are working and what they are typing as they type it. To try this, save a document to OneDrive for Business and invite your colleagues to join you in a simultaneous authoring session.
  • Insights in Excel and PowerPoint—Last month we delivered Insights in Word and Outlook, and we just brought it to Excel and PowerPoint. As a reminder, Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your Office experience. Fact check or explore terms without leaving your spreadsheet or presentation. Just right click any word or phrase and select "smart lookup."
  • Tell Me—Tell Me is an entirely new way to find the commands you need. Just type what you want to do in the Tell Me box at the top of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, and you will get a set of results that let you take the desired action directly from within those results.
  • Convert Hand Written Equations to Text—Use the Insert Equation feature to write math equations in Word, Excel and PowerPoint with a digital pen, a mouse, or even your finger, and Office automatically converts it to a "typed" format.

Microsoft has yet to announce a specific launch date for the final version of Office 2016, but it is expected to be released sometime before the end of 2015. You can still check out the preview version by going to Microsoft's website.

Source: Microsoft

John Callaham