Microsoft Office 365 Makes Teamwork a Breeze

Microsoft Office 365 and Office 2016 pack impressive new features designed to make work easier and more collaborative. Key highlights include co-authoring for real-time document editing, smart lookup powered by Bing, new visualization tools like waterfall and Pareto charts, and the Tell Me feature for quick task navigation. Additional benefits include simplified sharing, improved version history, and seamless cross-device access so you can start on your laptop and continue on your phone or tablet.

I recently started using Microsoft Office 365 | Office 2016. This brand new product is amazing and and is already increasing productivity and improving teamwork in work spaces around the globe.

This software has some amazing new features that will help you work smarter and make life a little easier for you.

Here are some cool Microsoft Office 365 features

1. Co-Authoring: This feature is available for documents shared on the OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online  cloud services and allows multiple people to simultaneously edit the same document. You can use this in Word, OneNote and PowerPoint. Real-time typing in Word lets you see where others are typing in a Word document and view their edits as they make them. This could be pretty useful if you have multiple people working on the same report or writing the same article.

2. Smart Lookup: The feature is powered by Bing and finds information from the web while remaining in the application. No need to open up a web browser for quickly looking something important.

3. New Themes: This feature let you choose the Office experience that’s right for you. You can choose from Colorful, Black, Dark Gray, and White themes. It all boils down to personal choice I suppose.

4. Modern charts and graphs: This has been added in Excel to help you visualize your data. You can now use the Waterfall graph (for visualizing financial statements with ease), the histogram graph  (for exploring and analyzing a distribution),  the Pareto graph (for finding the largest impact), the Box & Whisker chart (for bringing statistics to distribution),  the Treemap chart (for analyzing across hierarchies in one view) and more.

5. Tell Me quickly: This feature helps you find a task that you need to do quickly. This is a text field in Excel 2016, Word 2016, Outlook 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Access 2016, Visio Professional 2016, Project Professional 2016, Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Standard 2016 where you can enter words and phrases about what you want to do next and quickly get to features you want to use or actions you want to perform.

For example: If you can’t find the icon which allows you to Insert a picture into your Word document, you can type in “Insert Picture” and it will actually bring up a shortcut. You can also use Tell Me to find help about what you’re looking for.

6. Mac Retina display support: This feature delivers document text and graphics beautifully rendered and sharper than ever for Mac users.

7.  New Templates for Macs: If you’re a Mac user, this feature should help you jump start your work with a large new collection in each application. The template choices have been vastly improved.

I have to say that Microsoft Office 365 | Office 2016 is way better than Microsoft Office 2007 (the version that I’ve been using extensively over the last few years). They are both pretty stable, but using the newest version is much more refreshing. The mere fact that I know that I’m not going to lose any documents (thanks to OneDrive) is reason enough to win me over.

This software also features useful applications:

• Simplified Sharing (which lets you quickly and easily invite others to review or edit your document using the new share button).
• Improved Version History (which allows you to view or go back to earlier drafts of your documents so that you can edit and share your documents with confidence).
• Shared Notebooks for OneNote (which provides a shared, synchronized and centralized place to share all project information including photos, videos, drawings, typed or hand-written notes, screen clippings, and web pages)
• Clutter & Focused Inbox for Outlook (which learns how you prioritize your email and then puts low priority messages into a separate folder and helps you get through your e-mails faster).
• One-click Forecasting in Excel (which uses historical time-based data to create a forecast that predicts things like future sales, inventory requirements, etc).

The best thing of all is that you can use it across all your devices. It doesn’t matter if you started a document on your MacBook in the office, you’re be able to access the document on your Android, IOS or Windows smartphone and continue editing and working on it and finish it on your iPad / Surface / Galaxy tab when you get home. It really works across ALL devices.

Exciting, right? Sign up for a FREE 30 day trial / purchase a subscription for Microsoft Office 365 | Office 2016 NOW! Your stress levels will go down, you’ll get more productive and you won’t be disappointed.

Watch this space for regular updates in the Technology category on Running Wolf’s Rant.