The Office 365 team got the new year off to a great start in January by delivering Office across more platforms and adding new features, service updates, and apps for your devices. OneDrive for Business is now available for Mac and iOS devices.
You can combine Lync with new Polycom Unified Conference Stations to get a better video conference experience, with a 360-degree view and great sound quality. Power Query got new connectors and improvements that make it easier to use. And for educators, there’s a new Website with free OneNote training and resources plus integration of Moodle with Office Mix
* Office now on Android tablets – Now you can use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on your Android tablet – all optimised to give you the best mobile Office experience. Review Word documents by tracking changes and adding comments, and easily share your work. Excel spreadsheets support formulas, charts, tables, PivotTables, sorting, filtering and comments. And create stunning PowerPoint presentations with rich formatting and embedded video, transitions and animations.
* Outlook for iOS and Android – The new Outlook app for iOS and Android phones and tablets brings together the core tools you need to get things done – your e-mail, calendar, contacts and files – helping you get more done even on the smallest screen. One-touch your way through your inbox, find what you need fast, and easily schedule meetings and work with attachments.
Save Outlook.com e-mail attachments to OneDrive – With just one click you can now save an individual e-mail attachment or group of attachments to your OneDrive cloud storage. That way, attachments don’t clutter your mailbox and you can easily access and share them from your devices at any time.
* Access to password-protected sections in the OneNote for Windows Store app – Working on your favourite device and need to unlock a password-protected section of an OneNote notebook? No problem. Just go to the section, type in your password, and you can view and edit that section just like any other. To protect your privacy, the section automatically locks if you don’t use OneNote for a few minutes.
* OneNote for iPhone updates – With the new OneNote Today widget, you can capture your thoughts fast, right from the Notification Centre, without opening the app. Plus, the updated Recent Notes list includes the notes you’ve most recently edited on any device, so you can start on your desktop or tablet and pick up right where you left off in OneNote on your iPhone.
* New OneNote training Website for teachers, lesson plans and more – OneNote for teachers.com was developed to train educators – in about an hour – how to use OneNote in ways that are immediately relevant to their daily school lives. The training is interactive and free. Once you’re trained, you can add Bing in the Classroom lesson plans that are delivered in OneNote and learn how to use OneNote Class Notebook Creator, now available in many more languages.
* Office Mix not works with the Moodle open source LMS – Moodle, one of the most popular learning management systems, is now integrated with OneNote, OneDrive for Business, the Office 365 Outlook Calendar and Office Mix. With Office Mix, teachers can easily embed interactive online lessons created in PowerPoint. These lessons can include audio, video, digital ink, interactive simulations or assessments.
* New accessibility enhancement for Office Online – Office Online was designed to be usable with a screen reader, but over the past year it has been improved to make it even more accessible. With the new Narrator, you can hear formatting information read out loud when you use the arrow keys to navigate in a document. Also, in Word Online and OneNote Online you can have text read out loud, without having to move your cursor. More improvements are also available.
* Sway for iPhone available more broadly – The new Sway for iPhone app helps you easily pull together, format and share content in a way that’s expressive, so you can quickly create polished, interactive content from your mobile devices. Sway was initially released in New Zealand and Australia, but now customers in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, India and a number of other countries can also download Sway for iPhone.
* Sway updates – New features added to Sway on the Web include the ability to add content from third-party sites via embed codes and the ability to import content from documents in more file formats and to import documents more simply.
* Office now on Android tablets – Now you can use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on your Android tablet – all optimised to give you the best mobile Office experience. Review Word documents by tracking changes and adding comments, and easily share your work. Excel spreadsheets support formulas, charts, tables, PivotTables, sorting, filtering and comments. And create stunning PowerPoint presentations with rich formatting and embedded video, transitions and animations.
* Outlook for iOS and Android – The new Outlook app for iOS and Android phones and tablets brings together the core tools you need to get things done – your e-mail, calendar, contacts and files – helping you get more done even on the smallest screen. One-touch your way through your inbox, find what you need fast, and easily schedule meetings and work with attachments.
* Access to password-protected sections in the OneNote for Windows Store added – Working on your favourite device and need to unlock a password-protected section of a OneNote notebook? No problem. Just go to the section, type in your password, and you can view and edit that section just like any other. To protect your privacy, the section automatically locks if you don’t use OneNote for a few minutes.
* OneNote for iPhone updates – With the new OneNote Today widget, you can capture your thoughts fast, right from the Notification Centre, without opening the app. Plus, the updated Recent Notes list includes the notes you’ve most recently edited on any device, so you can start on your desktop or tablet and pick up right where you left off in OneNote on your iPhone.
* New accessibility enhancements for Office Online – Office Online was designed to be usable with a screen reader, but over the past year it has been improved to make it even more accessible. With the new Narrator, you can hear formatting information read out loud when you use the arrow keys to navigate in a document. Also, in Word Online and OneNote Online you can have text read out loud, without having to move your cursor. More improvements are also available.
* One Drive for Business comes to Mac and iOS devices – The new OneDrive app for iOS provides easy access to your personal and work storage and the new OneDrive for Mac Sync Client Preview enables you to take your OneDrive for Business files offline. Download the app from the app store and the sync client from the Download Centre, so you can access and manage your OneDrive for Business files from your Mac and iOS devices.
* Online meetings get the RoundTable experience with Lync and new Polycom Unified Conference Stations – A better conferencing experience is now available with RoundTable, a simple table top device that fits nicely within a meeting room. With a Polycom CX5100 on top, in a room with a Polycom CX8000 Lync Room System, you get a 360-degree view of your meeting room, with all the participants in a Lync conference equally visible, and the camera focus shifts automatically to the person who is speaking. The device is plug-and-play for Lync – no need to dial phone numbers or long conference IDs.
* Enhanced e-mail protection with DKIM and DMARC in Office 365 – In order to reduce phishing and spam and provide an even safer e-mail experience, Office 365 now supports inbound validation of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) over IPv4, and Domain-based Messaging and Reporting Compliance (DMARC). These technologies check for trusted authenticated senders and help identify untrusted ones that that fail authentication.
* New way to organise and share work in Office Delve – Delve helps you discover and explore content that’s relevant to the work you and your teams are doing. The new feature, boards, makes it easy to collect and organise content around ides and topics, so it’s readily accessible and easy to share. Try this new tool for collaborative, open gathering of ideas.
* Send Email feature in Access 2013 Web apps – One of the top feature requests from those of you using Access 2013 Web apps inside Office 365 is the ability to send e-mails from those apps. Now you can! You can send e-mails to others in your organisation about a specific record you’re viewing or from a table event, to alert users when new records are created, modified, or deleted.
* New OneNote training Website for teachers, lesson plans, more – OneNote for teachers.com was developed to train educators – in about an hour – how to use OneNote in ways that are immediately relevant to their daily school lives. The training is interactive and free. Once you’re trained, you can add Bing in the Classroom lesson plans that are delivered in OneNote and learn how to use OneNote Class Notebook Creator, now available in many more languages.
Office Mix now works with the Moodle open source LMS – Moodle, one of the most popular learning management systems (LMS), is now integrated with OneNote, OneDrive for Business, the Office 365 Outlook Calendar and Office Mix. With OfficeMix, teachers can easily embed interactive online lessons created in PowerPoint. These lessons can include audio, video, digital ink, interactive simulations or assessments.
Power Query January update – Many new connectors have been added to Power Query in Excel, plus a host of usability improvements, such as the From Azure ribbon drop-down menu and the Workbook Settings dialogue.
Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide.
Credit: Andy O’Donald @andyodonald