Microsoft is Updating Office Online with New Formatting and Viewing Features

Microsoft announced today that it will be adding a number of new features to Office Online over the next few weeks. Among the changes are new text formatting features for Word Online, object formatting for PowerPoint Online and new viewing experiences for both Word and PowerPoint Online.

There aren’t a lot of details, but here’s a rundown of the coming changes.

Text formatting in Word Online

Word Online is getting some nice text formatting features from the desktop version of Word.

New autocorrect features. This includes such things as automatically capitalizing the first letter of a sentence. More advanced formatting will come further done the road. For example, Word Online will do things like transform two hyphens into a dash.

Format Painter. This is one of my favorite Word features. As Microsoft notes, it lets you copy formatting from the selected content (Ctrl + Shift + C) and paste it onto a different set of content (Ctrl + Shift + V).

Object formatting in PowerPoint Online

PowerPoint Online will be picking up a number of new features:

New Smart Guides will help you more easily align your objects with other content.

Multi-select will let you to format more than one object at a time.

Create, edit and format tablets, and can even resize rows or columns. Previously, you could only view and relocate existing tables.

Easier viewing in Word and PowerPoint Online

Both Word Online and PowerPoint Online are getting updates related to improving the viewing experience.

Word Online will be updated with a High DPI experience for viewing PDFs.

PowerPoint Online, conversely, is getting updates related to smaller-screen devices: a new full-screen Reading View, plus a new Zoom tool in the Editing View.