Office 365 Things You Need to Know: What’s New in Office 2016

In my opinion, this week’s blog posts on Office 365 Things You Need To Knowwill be fun! We get to talk about our favorite features of Office 2016: co-authoring, innovative Excel chart styles, new ways to manage Outlook attachments, and more.

Word 2016 Co-Authoring

This is actually not a new feature, but an existing feature with expanded capabilities. We’ve supported co-authoring in various Office products since 2013. Excel has been the most sophisticated, the longest, allowing multiple people to edit the same spreadsheet at the same time and showing each person’s edit on the other editors screens – updating in real time. OneNote has had similar capabilities; for example, my wife and I use OneNote for the family shopping list. When we run out of something, we use whatever device is convent to update the list with a check mark beside the item to be purchased. At the store, we are able to use our mobile device to see what needs to be bought and remove the check accordingly – for us, it works great! When co-authoring first came out, Word and PowerPoint would allow multiple users to edit the same document at the same time, but would only present an indicator on other people’s screens that changes were pending. You then had to manually request an updated version of the document with all of the changes included.

But that has now changed! Now, when one person makes changes in Word, everyone else who is co-authoring the document will also see the changes – in real time! We’re not quite there with PowerPoint yet, but progress was made with conflict resolution – give us a little more time.

Some rules you should be aware of: SharePoint (on premises or online) or OneDrive (consumer or business) is required behind the scenes to facilitate the co-authoring and you can still lock a document for exclusive access if you don’t want people editing with you.

Want to try it out and don’t have Office 365? Try it with OneDrive (https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/13/preview-real-time-co-authoring-on-onedrive/). Want to learn more about the updated features of Office 2016, look at the Office 2016 Quick Start Guides and follow the TS2 blog this week!

  Steve