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Looking Forward to Office on Windows 10

2 minute read

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Today, Microsoft is celebrating the unveiling of Windows 10, now available across 190 countries with a free upgrade or with new PCs and tablets.

With Windows 10, we’ll get a familiar design that should make a lot of people happy, including a Start menu, Taskbar, and Desktop, plus Live Tiles that deliver streaming information:

Windows 10 also provides more security and innovative experiences like Cortana, Microsoft Edge, and the Xbox app.

Here at the BetterCloud Monitor, we’re most interested in the Office experience on Windows 10–what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what’s still to come. According to Microsoft,

Windows 10 is designed to run Office and Skype perfectly to increase your productivity. New Office Mobile apps on Windows 10 – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote – are available today in the Windows Store. Built for on-the-go scenarios, the Office Mobile apps offer a consistent, touch-first experience for small tablets. Full featured OneNote comes installed with Windows 10 for your digital note-taking needs. The upcoming release of Office desktop apps (Office 2016) will offer the richest feature set for professional content creation, designed for the precision of a keyboard and mouse.

Let’s take a look at the different components of Office that are being unveiled as part of Windows 10.

Universal Office Mobile Apps

The Office Mobile apps referenced in the quote above have also been referred to as “universal,” providing a touch- and mobile-friendly Office experience made for tablets and other mobile devices.

According to an early 2015 Office blogs post, “these new Office apps will be pre-installed for free on phones and small tablets running Windows 10, and available to download from the Windows Store for other devices” and “are optimized for touch and mobile use and are a great way to take your work on the go, no keyboard or mouse required.”

For more on these mobile apps, check out this Office Garage video:

By providing these universal mobile apps as a part of Windows 10, Microsoft is continuing their promise of providing products and services in a cloud-first, mobile-first world.

Office 2016

We still have to be patient for awhile longer for Office 2016, still in preview mode but expected to be officially released sometime this fall. Here are some highlights of what we can expect with Office 2016:

  • Easier accessibility to the cloud, like the ability to attach OneDrive files to an email message without leaving Outlook
  • Real-time co-authoring on the desktop applications, not just the Online apps
  • Smart features, like Clutter, Insights by Bing, and the Tell Me feature
  • Faster, better data analysis features in Excel
  • More compliance and security controls for IT administrators
  • Enhanced deployment and management options

Once Office 2016 is released, we’ll feature more updates, but for now we’ll focus on Windows 10 and the innovation it brings. Have you upgraded yet?

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