Top 5 New Features in Office 2016

The good news for those who don’t like big changes is that Office 2016 looks very similar to Office 2013. Since Microsoft wants you to move to their cloud, the majority of new features relate to the cloud and some require the Office 365 subscription.

  1. Word, Excel & Powerpoint Tell Me

Instead of the traditional help page that explains how to do something, the “Tell Me” tool lets you ask a question and get a one-click link to the tool you need. It’s a faster way to get help.

2. Excel 2016: New Charts

First Excel 2013 added new PivotChart features, Slicers and Flash Fill. Now Excel 2016 adds six new chart types:  Waterfall, Treemap, Pareto, Histogram, Sunburst and Box & Whisker.  This can be a big help if you’ve ever had to create these financial charts.

The next three items require an Office 365 subscription

3. Word 2016: Real time Co-authoring

If you have documents stored on One Drive or Sharepoint Online, you can edit them in real time with other people. This means more than one person can edit at the same time and changes appear to all users who open the document.

4. Outlook 2016: Cloud Attachments

In addition to the traditional document attachment, Office 2016 allows you to send links to saved files. If you send the link, it avoids having different copies in different locations for a document. Documents that are stored in One Drive or Sharepoint can have various permissions assigned to them.

5. Skype for Business : Conversations for Users of Office 365

Users with Office 365 have new features in Word, Excel and Powerpoint where you can use Skype for Business (otherwise known as Lync) to collaborate and communicate while working on documents. There is a new Share panel that allows you to quickly IM or video call someone with Skype.