Upcoming versions of Microsoft Office to use more AI and ‘decomposable’ document elements

According to a recent statement made by the chief experience officer for Microsoft Office, Julie Larson-Green, the company wants for users to spend more time accomplishing tasks than learning how the document creation tools work. In a plan that she outlined, she hinted at future versions of Office relying more on artificial intelligence and on ‘decomposable’ documents that make them easier to locate.

“No one wants to necessarily learn about the ins and outs of the tool; they have something that they’re trying to get done,” said Julie Larson-Green.

Elaborating on this, she said that elements of documents will be broken down so they are searchable. So a user could for example query ‘show me the last chart I sent to Neil’ and the application would locate this no matter where it exists--even across applications.

As part of this new direction, Larson-Green, who has been with Microsoft for over two decades, recently restructured the Microsoft Office team so they are now grouped by similar tasks and not by individual Office product. The aim is to have people working on ways for different apps interconnect to facilitate information flow across the Office tools.

This reorganization is especially pertinent, given the breadth of applications that comprise the Microsoft Office family, and it will be especially interesting to see how their recent LinkedIn acquisition plays into this strategy.