Microsoft has been telling us for some time that the new version of its almost ubiquitous productivity suit, Office, will see plenty of updates on a regular basis, and Redmond has kept true to its word. Various new features for Windows and Mac were announced at Ignite, although yesterday’s release, Microsoft says, is just a taste of what’s to come.  Speaking about the few updates Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services Team said, “These are just a few of the highlights, with many others available including Power Pivot improvements, improved grammar checkers, and more.”

Collaboration is key and Office’s Real Time Presence in Word feature is part the sharing experience. The company  says that real time typing will feature more prominently in later builds, and right now it’s only available to OneDrive for Business customers. It does what it says on the tin, so to speak, and allows multiple authors to work on a document, but also see where exactly your co-collaborator is editing. Also to improve the collaborative experience Microsoft has simplified the file sharing process by putting a Share option on the ribbon with options to end along or to save in the cloud.

Another nifty feature is Insights for Office which is a Bing powered informational tool used in Word and Outlook that allows users to select words in the text, things, people, places, and Bing will pull up the web information, kind of like having a mini-Cortana in Word.

Last and least Microsoft gives us Version History improvements, a tool that finds multiple versions of files saved in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. In the File menu click ‘History’ and you can view or restore previous versions of the file.

For this writer and many others presumably Office is hard to criticize, give or take the often uninvited, almost always invasive Clippy, who is rumored to be giving advice to Baba Jinx. If Microsoft has ever stayed out in front it is with its productivity suit. And on that rationale why not give the Office 2016 a shot by joining the preview.

Photo credit: Simonbarsinister via Flickr