Update 2 for Office 2016 Preview Released

As the Windows team at Microsoft closes in on the General Availability of their new operating system later this month the Office group has been pushing hard to update the popular Office suite of software towards its release later this year.

The Office 2016 Preview Program, which was launched in early May, allows you to try out the new programs ahead of its release and now the second update to this preview is available for public download and installation.

According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft's Corporate VP for the Office Client Applications and Services team, there is more being worked on for a future update to the Office 2016 Preview but for now these new features are available in the update 2 release:

New charts in Excel—There has been a lot of enthusiasm for the new charts in Excel we delivered— all based on user feedback. The six new charts include Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap and Sunburst.

Real-time typing in Word—Real-time typing is now in Word! You can see where others are working and what they are typing as they type it. To try this, save a document to OneDrive for Business and invite your colleagues to join you in a simultaneous authoring session.

Insights in Excel and PowerPoint—Last month we delivered Insights in Word and Outlook, and we just brought it to Excel and PowerPoint. As a reminder, Insights, powered by Bing, brings you contextual information from the web right into your Office experience. Fact check or explore terms without leaving your spreadsheet or presentation. Just right click any word or phrase and select “smart lookup.”

Tell Me—Tell Me is an entirely new way to find the commands you need. Just type what you want to do in the Tell Me box at the top of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, and you will get a set of results that let you take the desired action directly from within those results.

Convert Hand Written Equations to Text—Use the Insert Equation feature to write math equations in Word, Excel and PowerPoint with a digital pen, a mouse, or even your finger, and Office automatically converts it to a “typed” format.

The Office 2016 Preview consists of all the Office programs and can be tested by Office 365 subscribers or be installed using a product key on your system.

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