Does Microsoft OFFICE 2016 make life easier?

For 2 decades, Microsoft Office has been ingrained in everything we do when it comes to home or office computing.

It’s been the one thing that has existed on virtually every computer – essential for home accounting, homework for the kids, sending personal emails and doing important projects at home for work or college. At this stage, it’s safe to say that it’s part of the family.

Now, Microsoft has released Office 2016.  These apps are the latest addition to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based subscription service, their most comprehensive solution ever. Office 2016 isn’t just about Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The new and enhanced productivity suite has a lorry-load of incredible and helpful new tricks and features that are designed to make your life (and work) that much easier.

Microsoft applications of the past introduced you to the very concept of computing, but now they are reinventing what it means to be productive online. Be that connecting, creating and sharing with friends and colleague all over the world. All of which is doable on every type of device – no longer confined simply to your laptop.

Microsoft believes that you do — but more importantly, it wants you to get on the new way of thinking about Microsoft software: constantly updated, available in the cloud, and getting new features all the time. But that vision will take time to pan out. Right now you should make your choice to switch based on whether or not you really want the new features.

Office 2016 allows several people to work together on documents and incorporates a “Groups” section into its software that makes it easier for people to collaborate on projects. It also adds a “Tell Me” tool to Word, Excel and others that allows users to quickly search for functions instead of navigating Office’s labyrinth of menus, makes improvements to Outlook that prioritize important emails, and deeply incorporates Skype, the internet chat and video call service. New features in Windows 10 such as Cortana also integrate with the software, allowing the personal assistant to read and search your files to improve features such as the calendar.

Creating, collaborating, together with real time co-authoring

One of the biggest additions to the new Office 2016 is real-time co-authoring in Word. For the first time, you can now work on the same document at precisely the same time as potentially multiple friends and family members – not only that but you can see it all happen as they type. All of the changes are stored on one of Microsoft’s Cloud services and you can view and edit everyone’s revision history too.

Clutter be gone

Don’t you just love the work that your Spam folders are doing? They take in all the emails you never want and store them away from your eyes so you don’t have to worry about them. That’s what Clutter aims to do on more broad level. For example, if you never open emails from that online retailer you subscribed to, now they will be bundled together alongside those daily ‘funny’ emails your uncle sends you.

Skype integration

Sometimes you just need to have a chat with the people to collaborate. Before, you had to either call, email or use a third-party app or software to get your point across. Now, Microsoft have added the ability to chat from inside the apps so you can collaborate instantly, via Skype.  For example, start video or voice) from within Microsoft Word or Outlook – so no need to open or click between any other apps/windows. Just one click and you’re there – making collaboration seamless.

Tell me something you need

Sometimes, remembering the smallest things can be the hardest. If you hate formatting documents and trying to remember how to carry out a function like text indentation, a feature you may only use once in a blue moon. Now Office has come up with a solution. That solution is Tell Me. Simply enter a text command and Office will instantly figure out what needs doing and fix it for you. Want to change font to Arial? Simply enter “change font to Arial” and click on the corresponding command in the Tell Me search bar. Simple.

Smart Lookup is pretty smart

Ever been in a document before but need to check the spelling or definition of a word? Now, all you have to do is highlight the text or phrase, right click and select Smart Lookup in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. Office will then correlate all the most relevant info for you to use – all in your current window, meaning you won’t have to pop between applications and potentially get lost amongst a sea of cat videos. It can also be used for more complicated tasks like gathering info on cities, backing up your statements, checking dates and much more.

Away with the cloud(s)

When you sign up to Office 365, you get 1TB (that’s 1,000GB’s) of cloud storage. This is really an incredible offering – perfect for you or your family backing up your family photos, videos, documents, files or anything for that matter. This could all but eliminate the need for you to lug around those hefty storage hard-drives and better still, when it’s in the cloud, it’s easily accessible all over the world and on any device. And just to put that 1TB into perspective, other popular online storage clients only give you 25GB of storage. Not bad?

Sharing made simple

With the growing need to be able to share anything and everything – Office 2016 now enables you to share right from your document with a click of a button. This may sound simple (and it is), but this new feature will save you a lot of time.

Perfect for all the family

If you sign up to Office 365 for the year, you only have to pay for one user. That includes new Office 2016 apps for PC and Mac as well as installation on PC or Mac, tablet and phone. You’ll also get that shiny 1TB we talked about and expert Office technical support included. Not to mention the fact that Office 365 is now always updating it’s features so as soon as they become available, you’ll have them. You can also pay monthly, should you need to.