All About Microsoft 2016’s New Business Features

It’s here: Microsoft 2016 has finally come to greet businesses and individuals alike, and while the program is essentially the same as the last release, there are still some major changes. Some of the new features include tons of new productivity-boosting tools that anyone who may stray from tasks a little too often will love, among other things. Office 2016 is set to release with Windows 10, so here’s a little sneak peek of it to see if it might be worth purchasing for your company.

Extensions

This is exactly what it sounds like: small, compact programs that run alongside Office, just like extensions for Firefox or Chrome. These extensions can be customized and developed by just about anyone with the know-how and the determination to fit as much power into one window as possible (so that multiple applications no longer have to be juggled).

The best example of this is the demonstration that Microsoft did, showing some of the Outlook extensions that the company designed. The extensions essentially work as apps, like the Uber extension for Outlook. You can book a taxi from Outlook itself, and a warning will pop up when it’s time to decide if you need to book that cab or not. You can even give the extension info about your arrival destination by allowing it access to your inbox, and those details can be passed on to your Uber driver.

Many Security Features

Microsoft hasn’t been taking data breaches lightly, and in response the company has significantly beefed up security options for the 2016 Office apps. The most interesting and useful one that Microsoft has presented so far is Data Loss Protection that’s been designed for all of the new apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Data Loss Protection ensures that all of the data that being worked on stays in your network and isn’t sent anywhere else either on purpose or on accident. Outlook also comes with two-step authentication automatically.

Microsoft Word Insights

The new Insights can help you review a document and compare it to online resources without ever leaving Word. You can click, highlight, and “ask” questions by right-clicking. The references are found using Bing, naturally.

“Universal” Versions

Up to this point, a different version of Office has been introduced to the tablet, the smartphone and the computer. Office 2016 aims to consolidate all of those different apps into one, touch-enabled version. The interface can and will scale, so it won’t matter where you have a document open. Of course the last version of Microsoft Office brought us the “cloud” version, and this feature helps a document or slideshow travel safely and smoothly from one screen to the next, regardless of the size.

The new Microsoft Office 2016 features are promising, and with a few more insights, security features, and some development if you wish, it may be a worthy investment for your business – or just you.