Microsoft Word gets more intelligent proofing tools, plus there are feature updates coming to PowerPoint and Outlook
Subscribers to the popular Microsoft Office 365 suite will be seeing new features rolled out to some of their component applications. Among these, the most significant are with Microsoft Word, Outlook and PowerPoint.
The new ‘Researcher’ feature in Microsoft Word helps writers access research topics right from within the Word interface, pulling up verified sources of information, adding topics that can be viewed later, adding facts and citations and even referencing them within your document. The feature also automatically collates references into the footnotes and bibliography section of the document as it is created.
Also updated is the built-in editor that now helps clean up content beyond just spelling and grammar corrections--this new feature includes suggesting more apt alternatives for words, resulting in better sentence construction; features that could actually help develop writing skills.
The key update in PowerPoint is the new ‘Zoom’ feature that’s got nothing to do magnification in slides. This feature enables the presenter to create an interactive summary index slide, making it easier to jump between various parts of the slideshow over the course of a presentation (no more getting flustered the next time one of the audience asks to “open the slide with the sales forecast numbers”.)
Finally in Outlook there is a focussed Inbox that borrows from the mobile version of the mail client, where mails are smartly sorted into ‘stuff you should care about’ and ‘everything else’, much like the kind of automatic segregation that happens in Gmail. This feature is also designed to evolve and get better at what it does over time based on an individual’s particular emailing habits.
Microsoft will be rolling out these features to Office 365 subscribers, with Windows users understandably seeing them first. There appears to be no plans to include these features in the perpetual license versions of the suite, such as Office Home & Student 2016.
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