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    Categories: Tech

Microsoft announces new features for Office 365

Microsoft announces new features for Office 365. Image credit: Lubbock Christian University

Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team, just announced a new set of cloud-powered tools to be released in July. These apps meant to produce better results in an easier way. The highlighted features in this release are prioritizing the most important emails on Outlook, making PowerPoint presentations more dynamic and improving Word’s writing experience.

Office introduced Researcher. It is a new tool that can be used in Word, and it will help people to find and incorporate reliable sources and content easier. Within the Word document,  users will also be able to browse material related to the topic, and they can add it with a single click. Researchers will use Bing Knowledge Graph as its main engine to provide the right content.

The developing team also claimed that it would expand Researcher’s body of reference to include different sources such as national science and health centers, well-known encyclopedias, history databases and more.

The researcher feature is already available for Office 365 subscribers using Word 2016 on Windows desktops. The company also mentioned that they are soon to release a mobile Researcher app so people can start working on their papers not matter where they are.

The new features will help the user write better and prepare amazing presentations

Editor is Researcher’s counterpart as it will help you polish a paper once you are about to finish it, Editor features both an advanced proofing and editing service. Essentially Editor is an app that will try to simplify and improve the text by recommending proper words related to the writing and by “flagging” complex sentences.

The Editor app will also modify Word’s current visual proofing signals, from now on spelling edits will be red squiggles; grammar edits will be blue dot underlined and the written style will be a gold dot line. The office developing team expects Editor will learn from the information it finds on the cloud. 

Zoom is the newest Powerpoint feature that will let users create interactive presentations. Zoom works with a summary slide instead of the usual Powerpoint slide order that can make presentations static. Its primary objective is to have a more fluid presentation by not having to get out of it to find a slide.

There is also something new for corporate emails 

Focused Inbox is a new service that will divide the inbox into two different tabs, ‘focused emails’ tab and “others” tab, targeted emails will be detected according to the user’s activity and how he or she move through the interface. The staff said that all the emails would be equally easy to access, but they want to offer a more customizable experience.

As for Mentions, It’s a new Outlook tool only available for Office 365 subscribers. The feature will let people flag someone on an email using the @ symbol to choose the correct person. The feature will see identify the flagged person and add his or her email address to the ‘To’ bar. Then, Outlook will let that person know about it through an icon. 

Additionally, people can type ‘@’ at the search bar in Outlook, and the list of all the messages with flagged people will appear. 

Source: Office

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