Microcoft office 2016

MICROCOFT OFFICE 2016

Office 2016 is a major upgrade, but not in the way you’d first suppose. Just as Windows 10  ties notebooks, desktops, phones and tablets together, and adds a layer of intelligence, Office 2016 wants to connect you and your coworkers together, using some baked-in smarts to help you along.

I tested the client-facing portion of Office 2016. Microsoft released the trial version of Office 2016 in March as adeveloper preview with a focus on administrative features (data loss protection, multi-factor authentication and more) that we didn’t test. I’ve been using it since the consumer preview release in May. Microsoft seeded reviewers with a Microsoft Surface 3 with the “final code” upon it. That’s a slight misnomer, as the Office 2016 apps upon it used the same version that Microsoft had tested with the public, with a few exceptions: Outlook was pre-populated with links and contacts of a virtual company to give reviewers the look and feel of Delve, Outlook’s new Groups feature, and more.

Office 2013 users can rest easy about one thing: Office 2016’s applications are almost indistinguishable from their previous versions in look and feature set. To the basic Office apps, Microsoft has added its Sway app for light content creation, and the enterprise information aggregator, Delve. 

EXCEL: STILL INDISPENSABLE NOW MORE HELPFUL

Microsoft can’t mess too much with Excel, which is the most indispensable component of Office. Entire professions essentially live on Excel as their everyday tool.

Like modern calculator apps, however, Excel must meet the needs of a disparate group of individuals: statisticians, financiers, and data scientists, to name just a few. One new feature (also available in PowerPoint and Word) stands out: a small box in the ribbon that says, ‘Tell me what to do.’ The ‘tell me’ box is essentially a search box, much like Bing. But while Bing or the Smart Lookup feature adds context around the phrase in question, the ‘tell me’ box cuts through the numerous menus and submenus. If you’d like to know how to justify a group of cells, for example, you can begin typing ‘justify a group of cells.’ Excel will begin making suggestions that change as you continue typing. You can also choose to look for help on that specific topic, or do a Smart Lookup search instead. What the ‘tell me’ box does, though, is simply to do what you tell it to.

That’s both good and bad, in my book. While ‘tell me’ takes you directly to a command, it doesn’t tell you where that command is located. So if you want to perform that command again, you’re none the wiser.

I’ve typically thought of Excel, like PowerPoint, as an offline application. Not any more. Not only does it make more sense to post a link to an online workbook that others can use and manipulate, the complexity of these documents means emailing them back and forth simply isn’t practical. Instead of interacting with a document, Excel users now have a virtual workspace. I was also a little shocked to notice that Excel loaded only a handful of templates if I wasn’t connected. The ‘tell me’ box is essentially a search box, much like Bing. But while Bing or the Smart Lookup feature adds context around the phrase in question, the ‘tell me’ box cuts through the numerous menus and submenus. If you’d like to know how to justify a group of cells, for example, you can begin typing ‘justify a group of cells.’ Excel will begin making suggestions that change as you continue typing. You can also choose to look for help on that specific topic, or do a Smart Lookup search instead. What the ‘tell me’ box does, though, is simply to do what you tell it to.

I’ve typically thought of Excel, like PowerPoint, as an offline application. Not any more. Not only does it make more sense to post a link to an online workbook that others can use and manipulate, the complexity of these documents means emailing them back and forth simply isn’t practical. Instead of interacting with a document, Excel users now have a virtual workspace. I was also a little shocked to notice that Excel loaded only a handful of templates if I wasn’t connected.

Under the hood, numbers wonks are going to find lots to like in Excel 2016, with pivot tables that can handle dates, plus new charts and graphs that emphasize business intelligence—the new watchword for Excel. Excel 2016 also adds the ability to forecast results, extrapolating revenue growth, for example, a few years down the road. You’ll also find Power Query, an Excel feature that lets you pull in “live” sources of data from databases and Web pages, or your own corporate data. I rather like a feature that allows you to write equations by hand—handy on the Surface—although the recognition algorithm is still a little wonky.

POWER POINT SHOWS COLLABORATIONS PAIN POINTS

PowerPoint—the tool of most modern presentations—is an appropriate place to talk about what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with collaboration, and where it struggles.

In the upper right corner of most of the Office 2016 apps you’ll see a new “Share” button, which is where collaboration takes place. For now, however, the sharing experience differs sharply between apps like PowerPoint and Word.

Here’s how real-time collaboration works within Word: to share a document, you first save it to the cloud. Then you invite one or a series of people to edit it, using the Share button, which opens up an in-app message box. You can also eliminate all that and simply send a link. (Permissions are built in, so you can send one link to view, and another to edit.) I found using a link was better for casual editing, as the recipient can simply open the document as a “guest” in Word Online, rather than needing to type in his or her Microsoft password. (Otherwise, you’ll need a Microsoft account to authenticate yourself.)

As long as all parties have Office 2010 or later versions, real-time editing can take place: Invited guests can add, edit, or delete content in a sort of collaborative free-for-all. That can be managed, however, by some relatively fine-grained editing restrictions, such as locking format changes, restricting a user to making only tracked changes, or by blocking him or her entirely (while letting other users make free, unrestricted edits). You can attach a comment to the document itself, or to a specific location in the text (which then shows up as an icon). You can also manually save whenever you’d like to create a version history that helps organize the document further. Even if you’re offline, you can still monitor progress using Track Changes.

Адрес публикации: https://www.prodlenka.org/metodicheskie-razrabotki/324930-microcoft-office-2016