Microsoft Reveals Major Updates to Office.com and Office App for Windows

At its Ignite virtual conference this week, Microsoft announced major updates to Office.com and the Office app for Windows. Both interfaces provide a hub for your OneDrive-based content, Microsoft notes.

“Given the variety of documents and files we encounter in our work and the many means through which they’re accessed and stored, we created a tool to simplify how you work with and manage your content,” Microsoft’s Bill Doll revealed. “We designed a place to give you access to all your content no matter where it is stored, help you understand what needs your attention, and make it easy to get started with your work. We believe a tool like this will help people work more efficiently and simplify their lives.”

The following updates will come to Office.com and the Office app for Windows in the coming months:

Home. The default view is being updated to put your most important work up front and center. You’ll find a Recommended Actions section at the top and a Quick Actions section with customizable pivots and views to recently worked-on files.

My Content. This new page will display all of your content in a single place. “Everything you’ll find here is based on files and content you have created or that have been shared with you,” Microsoft notes. You will be able to sort files by file type, document activity, and time period; filter by keyword; see search results in a single page with infinite scroll; and access two new filters, for people and meetings.

Actions commands. The new experiences will feature new Actions commands to help you accomplish common tasks— sharing a document, creating a PDF, tagging files for follow-up in To Do, and blocking time for tasks in your Outlook calendar—more quickly.

Create. This new page provides links for all of the content types—Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and so on—that you can create with a single click, along with templates.

The new Office.com and Office app for Windows experiences will be gradually rolled out to users in the coming months, Microsoft says. But this video provides an early peek if you’d like to see more now.