Phenquestions
Barely months have passed when Satya Nadella assumed charge as the CEO of Microsoft, a series of reforms followed his office acceptance. First, we saw the announcement of Office apps for iPad, marking a sharp move away from the company's policies of keeping exclusive software services locked to Windows devices. Today, we learn it has brought some improvements to Office Online suite.
Office Offline new features
Formerly known as Office Web Apps, Office Online is Microsoft browser-based versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word. The suite although offered the look and feel similar to that offered by Microsoft Office suite apps in the past, it was light in weight and limited to certain basic features only. The announcement from the software giant brings joy to scores of Office Online users.
Among the additions/changes introduced is:
- Commenting for Word Online
- Tell Me for Excel Online and PowerPoint Online
- Printing for OneNote Online
The additions, Microsoft believes will put it in direct competition against Google Docs and other browser-based office productivity tools. Kaberi Chowdhury, an Office Online technical product manager, wrote in a blog post Monday,
We know you want features that allow you to move as seamlessly as possible between Office Online and the desktop.
Word Online receives a new comments pane that attempts to make it easier to collaborate with others and mark comments as being 'Done'. Moreover, the Word Online app now supports export of the word documents as PDF files. What was missing was the word “Microsoft”. It failed to appear in the screen grab anywhere.
Excel Online also gets an improved commenting capability, alongside the Word Online. Besides this, option to hide and unhide rows and columns by right-clicking on them, and an improved “Tell Me” help feature also finds a mention in the list of added features. The “Tell Me” functionality helps users find relevant commands in a drop-down list form, the same way Word Online does!
PowerPoint Online although not built from the grounds up, hosts modest changes. One being 'high-fidelity support'. An option that can be found The Convert Microsoft® PowerPoint Presentation dialog box (PowerPoint import dialog box). It allows you to import all animations into Captivate projects. Apart from the changes highlighted above, users also can now play YouTube videos embedded within PowerPoint Online slides.
Finally, OneNote Online has been extended with the ability to print your notes. In addition, OneNote Online has a new multiple-column menu system. It has been done so to maximize reading and editing space regardless of what device or browser you're using.
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