A new Office ‘Garage’ option is ‘Student Tools’ an extra ribbon featuring the tools Microsoft thinks are most appropriate for students.
It’s only available to students in USA, Australia or New Zealand for Office 365 for Windows or Office 2016 ProPlus.
Word Student Tool
Garage is where Microsoft tries out plug-ins and features. Dictation started as a Garage project and is now part of Office 365 for Windows.
Student Tools is a lot simpler than Dictation. It’s a set of four ribbons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are intended to show the major features that Microsoft thinks are relevant to students. That could be useful but it also serves Microsoft by promoting parts of Office 365 and cloud services.
Microsoft says:
“While talking with teachers and students from around the world, we heard a recurring theme; there were so many great features for students using Office, but students weren’t always aware of the latest tools that might benefit them. In addition, teachers expressed a need to have some of the best education-focused tools to be arranged in a single spot. Using this feedback, we had a hypothesis that if we installed a ribbon tab called “Student Tools” that pulls existing features from Office Desktop applications apps and places them into a single tab, that Students and Teachers both could discover and use the full breadth of Office features that already exist.”
The Student Tools tab, like any ribbon tab, can be moved along the tab row. Right-click on the tab, choose Customize Ribbon, select the Student Tools item then the Up/Down arrows.
From the same Customise Ribbon dialog you could also make your own tab with a personal selection of commonly used tools.
Excel
PowerPoint
OneNote
If you or your school qualifies, fill in this form (which uses the rare noun ‘submittal’).
You can sign-up for this new add-in here.
