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Opt in to this and we strongly suggest that you do and you'll get a truly collaborative working environment that easily rivals Google Docs. Word Online is itself a cut-down version of the desktop edition. The mobile, web, and Windows 10 Word Online apps share a common, consistent interface. The feature selection is very similar to that provided by Google's service, but the layout and interface are a slicker, albeit a little slower-loading.
Users invited to collaborate will be able to edit files online even if they don't have their own Office subscription. You get a range of text and page formatting options; it's easy to insert tables, images and symbols, and we're fans of Word Online's spelling checker and on-screen word count in a bar at the bottom of the page. It'll even show a count for a highlighted section of your document.
Simultaneous online editing isn't an entirely smooth and trouble-free experience however. We're not too keen on the way we had to manually move from view mode to edit mode when accessing a shared Word Online file.
Saving and loading files from OneDrive using the desktop version of Word can be sluggish if your internet connection is slow. We also noticed that files open on the desktop occasionally lost sync with versions being edited online.
Even so, these are relatively minor issues with what's become an outstanding online word processor that now capably spans the gap between desktop, web and mobile. Word is quite simply the best word processor on the market. It's also the first desktop word processor to allow collaborative editing of shared online documents, giving you all the features of the desktop with the syncing of purely web-based rivals such as Google Docs.
Like most of Office , Outlook is little changed, which we appreciate, as sudden changes to your email client are rarely welcome. However, there are a few new options, most of which are there to provide better integration with Office 's cloud-based sharing services. When you add file attachments from OneDrive or SharePoint to an email, you can choose whether recipients are allowed to only view them, or whether they can have edit permissions that'll allow them to collaborate online and change the shared document.
If your business has moved its email to Microsoft's Office cloud, using either an OnMicrosoft domain or mapping your own domain to the service, then your users will have access to Outlook's Groups feature. This makes it easy to create shared, fully archived message histories between groups of colleagues working on shared projects, for example.
Even newly added group members will get complete access to the message archive, making it easy to bring them up to speed on the conversation.
Groups can also easily share file and calendars, and extra administration tools are available from Office 's online admin centre. Other improvements that Office mail users get include extra inbox sorting in the form of the Clutter feature. This allows you to categorise email that's low-priority but not entirely unwanted as "clutter". Outlook will learn from your decisions over time and automatically file messages in the clutter folder so you can look at them at your leisure, without them getting in the way of more important items.
Excel is perhaps the component of Office that has the fewest rivals. Although there are a number of fairly capable spreadsheet packages around, with Google Sheets making for a lightweight web-based alternative and LibreOffice Calc standing up to heavier use, none comes close to the sheer range of features that Excel provides. Excel's seen some of the most significant changes to any part of Office.
Its standard functions and interface remain unchanged from Office , so even your most complicated spreadsheets and macros will continue working. However, Excel has received some additions to its data importation and handling functions, which all ties in to Office 's more integrated, cloud connected update.
The Data tab is now home to some functions previously only available through the Power Query add-in: you can now import data from a huge range of databases, both local and in the cloud. Other new features include a number of extra charting and data visualisation options, including waterfall charts for tracking changes to values over a time, box and whisker plots to show statistical variation, and sunburst charts to illustrate hierarchical data.
For users that handle profit and loss, marketing, or sales data on a regular basis, the data forecasting options have been refined. There's now a one-click Forecast button under the Data tab, and rather than a simple linear forecast, exponential smoothing features have been added to even out inconsistencies caused by one-time data spikes in the past.
Pivot tables have seen some of their most significant updates since , with automatic relationship detection and time grouping, as well as in-table editing for advanced features such as custom measures. Further incremental improvements include direct publishing to Microsoft's PowerBI visualisation platform, automatic rotation for inserted images, extra shape styles for charts and diagrams, touchscreen support with handwriting recognition for equations, and the same online integrations that the rest of Office has seen, with document sharing and built-in web searches.
However, there are a couple of improvements we were hoping for that haven't come with this release. For example, Excel still lacks a convenient method of exporting graphs and charts as high resolution images. Surprisingly, unlike Word and Google Sheets, two people can't work on the same spreadsheet in real time unless both are using the less-feature rich Excel Online to access it.
You can give others editing rights over your documents via Office , but if you keep your workbook open in Excel on the desktop, they won't be able to edit it. You can invite people to edit your Excel workbooks, but if you have it open in Excel, they won't be able to editing using Excel Online.
The standard Professional edition of Office is rounded out by more specialist apps that have seen fewer changes than Word and Excel. Microsoft Publisher has no listed changes at all, and hasn't even acquired the otherwise universal 'Tell me what you want to do' box.
However, the simple layout and desktop publishing suite remains an underrated gem: it's very easy to use and allows anyone to quick put together simple newsletters, briefings and notices that require a little more formatting than Word is designed to handle.
Microsoft Publisher doesn't get any new features at all but is still an underrated gem. PowerPoint 's most important upgrade is support for co-authoring, which means that you and a colleague can work on the same presentation together in real time, as long as it's saved to your OneDrive cloud storage. Access might not be the most fashionable database development tool around, but Microsoft's been working hard to keep it relevant, with web app support and integration with SharePoint , although that product is currently in public beta.
The latest version of Access also introduces new templates to make it easier to organise your data. There are template options for creating web-based apps as well as local databases, and both options include plenty of tutorials and video guides to help users who are new to database development.
It's inevitable that most businesses will be upgrading to Office sooner or later, with many likely to be planning an upgrade almost immediately. The good news is that this latest version is great.
Nothing's been broken and the new features add value, particularly for enterprises that use Office as a cornerstone of their software ecosystem. Extra support for sharing and collaborative working mean that Office now feels like software that works as part of cloud-based system, very much improving on the previously awkward experience of trying to work online with colleagues using a combination of Office and Office Mobile.
Unfortunately, it's not perfect when it comes working together online. You only get proper real-time collaboration and co-authoring in Word and PowerPoint. The best part of Smart Lookup is that uses the context of the words around the one you selected to get the best search results. For instance, if you run Smart Lookup on the word "dating" in sentence about carbon dating, Bing will show results for carbon dating, not romance. Google Docs has had a similar research tool for years, but it's nowhere near as powerful as a this new Smart Lookup feature or even a regular Google search.
Microsoft acknowledges that the Office apps have so many features that it can be hard to remember where to find all of them in their various menus. So Microsoft's Office team created a new search tool to help you find them. Think of it as a far less annoying and more helpful Clippy. In the ribbon main menu bar at the top for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, click on "Tell me what you want to do" and start typing the name of a feature you need.
The app will find it and display the exact menu you need, without needing to dig around for it. It's a simple addition, but one that would have come in handy for me many years ago writing college papers and constantly forgetting where to find the footnote tool.
The new Share menu in each app shows everyone who has access to that file. Hover over a name and you'll see a pop-up menu with quick links to send a message or start a voice or video call with Skype, without opening the Skype app on your computer. The only downside to this feature is that it only works if you have the Skype app installed on your machine and use Skype for Business.
While it includes several big changes, Office is all about the small touches. One little new feature that adds a lot of functionality is the ability to pick up where you left off in a document.
When you reopen a file you've been working on, Word shows you where you last worked and lets to jump to that place with one click. It's essentially a bookmark for your documents, and it's a fantastic tool for anyone working on a lengthy project over several days or weeks. Microsoft Office has long been the standard for those who use word processors, spreadsheet tools and presentation builders at work.
That's because Word, Excel and PowerPoint are packed with advanced features, like mail merge, detailed charts and animated slides that are missing or limited with other programs. And for many people, Excel is the gold standard program for crunching large amounts of data.
Not to mention, Office was designed to work both online and off, so you can do your work no matter where you go. Google Docs can work offline, but you'll need to have opened your file before you go off the grid.
Google has improved Docs over the years, adding new features and making it work better, it still pales in comparison to what Office has been able to do for the last decade. If your work requires a full range of features and offline editing, it's still very hard to beat Office. Office introduces real-time typing to Word, where two or more people can work on a document at once, and you can see what everyone is typing.
Each person is shown as a colored text cursor with their name that moves as they type. This works well, and as long as every person editing has a stable Internet connection, you'll see changes and additions almost immediately. Multiple people can work at once, but this feature is only available in Word. Google Docs has had this same feature for several years now, and what makes it better is that it works in Google's presentation app Slides and in Sheets, the spreadsheet app.
That gives Google the upper hand here -- at least for the time being. Microsoft has worked hard to make sharing much more seamless in Office , but unfortunately, it still doesn't feel as easy as sharing in Google Docs.
Type in an email address and decide if that person can only view the file or edit it, and click share to send them a link to the file. In my tests, sharing a file send an email to recipient, with a link to that file, instead of sharing an attachment. Microsoft designed it that way to make sharing easier, without requiring that you download the file before you open it.
However, clicking the link opens Office. You can then open the file in the desktop versions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint for more advanced editing tools. The whole process feels like more work and more steps than sharing a file created in Google Docs. For students, teachers, workers or anyone who just needs to write, edit, build spreadsheets and create presentations, it's hard to beat Google Docs' free tools.
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides don't have as many features as Office, but for many people they have enough to get the job done. The full version of Office is going to cost you. Now, that's what you'll pay for the full version of Office, but Microsoft also has free tools with Office.
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