Wednesday, June 10, 2015
This week Microsoft released a public preview of its upcoming productivity suite, Office 2016. You can download and try Office 2016 Preview for 180 days, as long as you're running Windows 7, 8.1, or 10, or Mac OS X. However, the Windows Office preview can't run alongside a current version of Office unless you set up a virtual machine. Read on for our sneak peek at what you can expect in Office 2016, before its expected final release in fall 2015.
Inside Office 2016
We ran Office 2016 Preview inside a Windows 10 virtual machine, which you can try for yourself with our handy guide. Keep in mind that Office 2016 is in active development, so things you see in this story may change over time.
App tabs
The top border of each app is colored-coded: Word is blue, Excel is green, and so on. In Word, the Page Layout tab is shortened to just Layout. The Apps section of the Insert tab has a direct link to a Wikipedia tool that opens up wiki pages in the sidebar to the right of your document. This might be handy for laptop users or others who are limited to one screen. The Add-Ins tab is gone, though. There's a text-entry field to the right of the tabs now that can use search terms to help you find functions, like creating a table or using a grammar checker. There's a link at the bottom of your search results that will send you to Office's documentation for more info.
File menu
The File menu looks largely the same. The Open section has renamed Computer to This PC and specifies which OneDrive account you are logged in to (if any). The recent documents list to the right now contains date stamps. In the Save As section, the Browse button has been moved from the right to the left.
Options menu
In the Options menu, we have a few more themes to select from, such as Medium Gray and Colorful, with the latter as the default. You can switch to White to make Office 2016 look more like 2013. Other than that, the Options section appears to be identical. It's also the only place to access your Add-Ins settings.
Excel 2016
In Excel, the Cell Styles menu now drops down from a button -- all the previously visible presets are now tucked into this drop-down. Those presets took up a lot of real estate on the ribbon, so this is probably a good change. Similarly, your sources on the Data tab have been condensed to a Get External Data drop-down menu. The Data Tools icons are smaller, to make room for two new sections labeled Data Model and Forecast. The first section plugs you into Power Pivot, which integrates a function that was previously available as an add-in. Forecast was also available before, just not featured on the ribbon. Like all other software in the Office 2016 suite, Excel has the new search field and no Add-Ins tab.
The future of Office 2016
During the Build 2015 conference, Microsoft demonstrated Office 2016 integrating with third-party services -- Excel logged in to an SAP server, for example, and Outlook offered calendar notifications from Uber. But those features don't appear to be available in this preview, at least not yet. Meanwhile, Microsoft has not issued an official release date, though the Office blog projects fall 2015. Historically, Office has come out in January, but perhaps Microsoft doesn't want to miss the holiday season this time around. We'll keep you posted.
