Microsoft Office has changed, how you use it should too

▤ Summary

With the ghostly sobbing of every Office product and marketing person for the last five years ringing in my ears, I suggested that what they were actually looking for was Microsoft Word, with the document saved into OneDrive. As Office 365 matured, the monthly updates went from being new checkboxes in the admin portal to new features in the applications that were the kind of improvements you used to have to wait three years to get. And then there are the new services for Office like Planner and Teams, integrations like Flow and PowerApps for making your own workflows and mobile or web apps, Forms for making surveys and polls (and forms and questionnaires), To-Do (the Wunderlist replacement thats starting to integrate with OneNote and Cortana, StaffHub (a much better tool for scheduling shifts and appointments), Kaizala (a mobile chat app designed for people who will never have a desktop and need to do all their scheduling and collaboration and co-ordination on a phone), Stream and Video for sharing videos within a company -- plus the way SharePoint is turning into a modern content and collaboration service rather than where documents go to get deleted by admins every six months. If youre a home user, youll see handy new features -- like Excel automatically knowing what a country is and looking it up in the Microsoft Knowledge Graph and adding a list of states or cities and timezones, or PowerPoint finding images for you and suggesting the design for your slide -- but Office might feel like the same product its always been. @ mentioning colleagues in a Word document and leaving them a to-do in the document for where they fill in their section, sending out a survey through Forms that gets collected as an Excel spreadsheet that Excel Ideas turns into a Pivot Chart for you, looking at MyAnalytics and SharePoint to see who is working on the same areas as you that you havent spoken to recently; those are very different things from writing an invoice or typing out the bullet points of a presentation.

▦ Linked Companies

Microsoft

$1B+