Following Microsoft’s Windows preview event for consumers Julia White, general manager for the Office Product Management team, gave a little bit more away in an Office blog post on Thursday as to what we can expect from the new Office for Windows.

While Microsoft seems to be keeping quiet about the new desktop version of Office, named Office 2016, rumors have already suggested that we will see a more eye-friendly dark theme and also a search assistant that will help with all Office queries.

We do know a fair bit more about Microsoft’s touch-optimized Office for mobile devices however, and that we should see a preview of the “universal” Office apps in the coming weeks. We also know that Office apps will come installed for free on all devices running Windows 10.

White wrote briefly on what we can expect from the new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook for mobile. With Word collaboration is the main focus, and so we will see documents that are available to edit in real time and shared between users. Word will also feature the Bing powered Insights for Office which will allow users to access web references and images when reading documents.

PowerPoint will have an Ink Tools feature which will enable users to annotate presentations in real time, while Excel documents should be made less finicky with touch-first controls. On OneNote White wrote that sharing notes will be made easier with the Office ribbon experience, and as for Outlook we are told that Inbox management will be unproblematic with touch-controlled flagging, sorting reading and archiving capabilities.

The new version of the ubiquitous Office for desktop is still a bit of mystery, but we are hoping Microsoft has some more tricks up its sleeve. Microsoft does say that we can look forward to some “compelling new experiences” which will be revealed in the coming months. The release date for Office 2016 is the second half of this year.

Photo credit: Microsoft