Microsoft made the Office 2016 on Windows Preview available to the public last month and there are now over one million users on Windows and Mac devices.
That is a lot of telemetry and feedback for the Office developers to work with as the development of the next version of Office continues.
Those users are now due to receive their first update to the preview suite of programs.
In a post at the Office Blog, Kirk Koenigsbauer the Corporate Vice President of the Office Client Applications and Services team, shares some of the new features in this update.
- Real Time Presence in Word—While Real Time Typing will ship in subsequent builds, we are rolling out a key part of that collaborative experience with Real Time Presence. Real Time Presence allows you to see where in a document your teammates are editing. We are turning this on first for OneDrive for Business subscribers but it will be available more broadly soon.
- Simplified file sharing—We are simplifying the process of sharing files and making them available to others to review, comment, and edit. Just clicking Share on the Ribbon will save your file to the Cloud and make it available to others in one easy step.
- Insights for Office (currently in Word and Outlook)—Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your reading experience. Try it by selecting keywords, like people or places, in your content and watch as Insights pulls relevant information into the Task pane to help you learn more.
- Version History improvements—We made it easier to find different versions of files stored on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. You can click the History command in the File menu to view or restore any previous version.
The program is still open to anyone who would like to sign up.
Just head over to the Office 2016 Preview site and download the installer file. The same file can be used to test if you are an Office 365 subscriber or just want to use the stand alone version. The first time you run an Office 2016 Preview program insert the provided product key for using the stand alone version instead of an email address.
For those of you on Office 365 there are a few more steps involved and they vary depending on whether it is a Home or Enterprise subscription to Office 365. Those steps are clearly provided on the Office 2016 Preview site.
