Office 365 November Updates Focus on Collaboration

Office 365 November Updates Focus on Collaboration

Microsoft has added new collaboration features to Office 365 this month. Key among them are co-authoring capabilities in PowerPoint, upload attachments to the cloud in Outlook, and a new Shared with Me view across various Office applications.

Here are the big new features this month. Thankfully, it’s a shorter list than the previous few months, and is thus a bit more manageable.

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Real-time co-authoring in PowerPoint

Availability: PowerPoint Mobile on Windows tablets and PowerPoint 2016 on Windows desktops for Office 365 subscribers in the Office Insider program.

ppt-collab

Already available in Word 2016 for Windows, PowerPoint 2016 now sports real-time co-authoring capabilities so you can see what others you’re working with are typing and changing in real time.

Cloud attachments in Outlook

Availability: Outlook on the web (Office 365 commercial) Outlook 2016 on Windows desktops for all Office 365 subscribers.

cloud-attach

Now, you can move a locally-attached file in an email message to OneDrive and then specify sharing permissions. You can learn more about this feature here.

Mobile notifications in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Mobile

Availability: Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Android and Windows Mobile for Office Insiders. (Coming soon to iOS.)

nots-in-android

Word, Excel and PowerPoint will now trigger notifications on your handset or tablet when there is activity in shared, cloud-hosted documents. This feature varies a bit between the consumer and commercial versions of Office 365, in that both types of customers will receive notifications when documents are shared with others, while consumers are also notified when documents are edited.

Share with Me in Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Availability: Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows 206 for PC and Mac, for all Office 365 subscribers, and on Android and iOS. (Coming soon to Windows Mobile.)

shared-w-me

A new Shared with Me tab in Word, Excel and PowerPoint works like the similar view in OneDrive, and helps you find and open documents that others have shared with you.

Recent folders in Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Availability: Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows 2016 for PC for Office 365 subscribers in the Office Insider program.

Microsoft has added a Recent Folders list in the Recent tab in these applications so you can navigate to the right place to find or save your files.

There’s more, so check out the Office Blogs post for a complete list.

 

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Conversation 6 comments

  • 5530

    29 November, 2016 - 3:20 pm

    <p><em>Real-time co-authoring in PowerPoint</em></p>
    <p>OH MY GOD YES</p>
    <p>&nbsp;</p>

  • 774

    29 November, 2016 - 7:41 pm

    <p>Microsoft has made "Office 365" "a little confusing" (as you’ve mentioned from time to time). Since MS doesn’t distinguish well–or at all–between Office 365 Individual/Home on the one hand and commercial (at various levels) on the other several hands, doing so seems to fall to Thurrott and Sams and Bott and Hay and others.</p>
    <p>&nbsp;</p>
    <p>Your Availability statements in this article are an excellent start. (If I knew whether "Insider" is available to Individual/Home, they would help even more–that’s my fault.)</p>
    <p>Thanks.</p>

  • 5047

    30 November, 2016 - 1:20 am

    <p>Perhaps this one snuck in at some random point, but it looks like the ability to @mention a co-worker has made its way to Outlook 2016 (whereas it was previously only on Outlook on the web for O365 Business subscribers). That, or by my admin unlocking Microsoft Teams preview, it also put me in the Insider builds for Outlook.</p>

  • 830

    30 November, 2016 - 3:42 am

    <p>Hi Paul – small typo on the "Share with Me in Word, Excel and PowerPoint" Should it read "Office 2016", not "Windows 206"?</p>
    <p>&nbsp;</p>

  • 289

    Premium Member
    30 November, 2016 - 12:25 pm

    <p>My company made the decision to move to Google Suite about a year ago; seeing everything that Microsoft has done with Office in the past year just bums me out. &nbsp;We still have desktop Excel and PowerPoint licenses to keep up with client needs, but we’re missing out on all of the Office 365, Skype, Delve, OneDrive, Sway, etc. goodness.</p>

    • 241

      30 November, 2016 - 1:20 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#27975">In reply to </a><a href="../../../users/Chris_Kez">Chris_Kez</a><a href="#27975">:</a></em></blockquote>
      <p>That is a bummer. Microsoft just keeps building great features into the Office platform.&nbsp; My company is on the Deferred setting so I have to keep waiting for a lot of the "announced" features.</p>

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