Microsoft has pushed out an update for the Office 2016 Preview with some feature updates and, presumably, bug fixes.
The company is highlighting the following things in the update:
- Real Time Presence in Word–While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon.
- Simplified file sharing–We are simplifying the process of sharing files and making them available to others to review, comment, and edit. Just clicking Share on the Ribbon will save your file to the Cloud and make it available to others in one easy step.
- Insights for Office (currently in Word and Outlook)–Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your reading experience. Try it by selecting keywords, like people or places, in your content and watch as Insights pulls relevant information into the Task pane to help you learn more.
- Version History improvements–We made it easier to find different versions of files stored on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. You can click the History command in the File menu to view or restore any previous version.
Grammar changes
One part of Word and Outlook to watch is the grammar checker because it’s fundamentally changing. Microsoft is totally rebuilding the grammar checking system. They are switching to software made by Microsoft and reducing (if not removing) the technology license fees to other companies. That means there’ll certainly be differences in some blue squiggly lines in Word 2010/2013 and the new system in Word 2016. At the moment, Word 2016 Preview lacks the Style check available in Word 2013 and many of the options:
However, there’s still time for the new grammar engine to restore the features that Office users have come to expect. Most notably the Oxford Comma check.
There are other things like Power Pivot improvements plus other unspecified changes.
