Microsoft 365 improves web and desktop productivity with new features in Office that help people brainstorm, create, and present
With school back in session and work schedules ramping up, this time of year can be hectic. So it’s the perfect moment to highlight app updates and enhancements that help you work more productively—with the flexibility and mobility that modern life demands. We’re committed to empowering people to use the cloud to work and learn from anywhere, and Office for the web now fully enables this new productivity.
Today, we’re excited to announce new features to help you brainstorm, create, and present more effectively
Practice makes perfect with Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web
Public speaking doesn’t have to be nerve-wracking. Our public preview of Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web uses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help business professionals, teachers, and students become more effective presenters
When you enter rehearsal mode and speak into a microphone, Presenter Coach gives you real-time on-screen feedback to improve public speaking skills. This includes helpful tips on pacing, including inclusive language, using too many filler words like “basically” or “um,” and avoiding the sense that you’re just reading the slides.
At the end of the rehearsal session, a handy report highlights the areas for improvement. Currently, the Presenter Coach only works in English. We’ll continue to add new capabilities and improve performance in the coming months.
Present, annotate and interact naturally with Inking in Office for the web
Today, we’re announcing new capabilities to help you create more effective presentations in Office for the web—including Inking in PowerPoint for the web. Now that you can present in PowerPoint for the web and ink and annotate in real-time, there’s no need for a laser pointer to highlight or point to important information.
Ink has come a long way since we first introduced it. Based on the great feedback, we made numerous improvements to Inking in Slide Show across all platforms. One of our top requests from customers—the ability to effectively animate process flows and diagrams—is now possible with the new Ink Replay in Slide Show feature. Ink appears, step by step, to create impactful animations that bring work and ideas to life.
Ink Replay animations on PowerPoint for Windows and Mac, as well as annotating with digital pen in Slide Show on PowerPoint for the web, are available for Office Insiders and rolling out now. Additional Inking in Office for the web support will be coming soon.
Brainstorm together and get work done with new Microsoft Whiteboard templates for desktop
We’re also announcing templates in Microsoft Whiteboard to help you collaborate more effectively—whether you’re trying to brainstorm your next big idea or get everyone on the same page. These templates can help you run more effective meetings with KANBAN sprint planning, SWOT analysis, project planning, learning, and more.
Pre-created layouts provide an immediate structure—with helpful tips for running activities—and expand to fit all your content. Read more about the new Microsoft Whiteboard templates.
Microsoft Whiteboard templates is now in public preview for Windows 10 and rolling out to iOS within a few days. To add templates, click or tap the Insert button in the toolbar.
Bring your ideas to life with new 3D models and lesson plans in Office for desktop
Visual learning is essential for effectively educating students in the digital age. 3D in Office allows anyone to easily communicate their ideas by inserting their own 3D models or selecting one from our library of content. Based on overwhelming feedback from the Office community, we have added a set of 23 education-based 3D models and 10 lesson plans on topics, including geology, biology, and space.
These engaging models help parents and teachers quickly communicate comprehensible and retainable information to students. Created by Lifeliqe, the new lesson plans complement the models to create a comprehensive learning experience.
The new 3D models and lesson plans are now generally available to Office 365 subscribers in Windows.
Microsoft 365 makes work and play more intuitive and natural with innovations in voice, digital ink, and touch
Today at our Surface event, we announced several new devices to help make modern work more natural and intuitive for everyone, including busy professionals, parents, students, and teachers. Over the past several years, our engineering teams have invested countless hours of user research into understanding how people work in our apps and what they would like to see from Microsoft.
Last week, we announced several new capabilities that bring new inking capabilities to our Office apps, including inking in Slide Show while in PowerPoint on the web and Ink Replay to bring your presentations to life. Today, I’m excited to share our progress with you on a set of innovations to help people be more productive when away from their desk, utilizing voice, digital pen, and touch across Office 365 and our Surface devices.
Transcribe audio files or record your own while staying in the flow in Word
We spoke with researchers, reporters, lawyers, and teachers, and learned that people spend a ton of time recording audio interviews on their phone, and then spend even more time transcribing those conversations into Word.
Today, we’re announcing a solution that helps busy professionals upload their own audio files or record new ones on the fly, all within Word. Once your audio has been uploaded or recorded, Word—leveraging your OneDrive account to securely store the audio files and Azure Speech Services under the hood—displays a written audio transcription in the side panel and allows you to quickly and easily bring relevant snippets or the entire transcript into your document to edit. The transcript itself is automatically separated by speaker and into relevant chunks of content, and the interactive panel allows you to easily jump around the recording to find and verify the perfect quote.
Audio transcription in Word will be available in early 2020 in Word for the web, with integration into the Word desktop and mobile apps following in the spring. Exact plans and pricing will be announced closer to general availability.
Input data directly into your Excel workbooks with your digital pen
Excel is an extremely powerful tool to do complex data analytics, but that doesn’t mean you need to be sitting at a desk to use it. Today, people fill out checklists, research reports, and more using paper and a clipboard and then must type those results into their computer later. Or they fumble to balance a computer to type while walking around. To address these issues, we’re elevating what your digital pen can do in Excel so Firstline Workers, busy professionals, students, and researchers can easily write, edit, or delete values using only their digital pen and tablet. Now it will be easier than ever to be productive and stay connected for workers who aren’t always able to find a desk to work.
Data entry using a digital pen will be available in Excel for the web and desktop in spring 2020 for Office 365 subscribers.
Create and reply to comments from anywhere using pen or voice
With Ink Editor we’ve made it so that editing your documents is easier and more natural than ever, and now we’re extending those intelligent capabilities and the expressiveness of digital ink into the realm of commenting as well.
On devices with a touch interface and/or supported microphone, people will be able to create expressive ink comments directly from within the comment pane, or use dictation to provide feedback. Together, and combined with existing Ink Editor capabilities, anyone reviewing a document can now complete that task end-to-end using just their tablet, digital pen, and voice.
Expressive ink comments and easy entry to dictation in comments will be available starting with Word desktop in Spring 2020 for Office 365 subscribers.
Office + Surface are better together
Today at the Surface event, we showcased several new enhancements to Office that leverage the unique capabilities of Surface’s latest hardware advancements.
The new Studio Mics in the Surface Pro 7 offer best-in-class audio-capture with no additional hardware, which makes Office features such as dictation and transcription work at their best.
When using your Surface Earbuds together with PowerPoint, you get the benefit of incredible microphones to hear you clearly even as you walk around, allowing Live Captions and Subtitles and Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web to operate with better accuracy. The intuitive gestures can be used to navigate Slide Show and start/stop video without having to buy a separate clicker. You can even have just one in your ear for the best mic capture while keeping the other invisibly hidden in your hand to navigate slides.
Surface Earbud gesture support will be available alongside general availability of the Earbuds, in PowerPoint desktop for Office 365 subscribers.
The ultra-portability of the Surface Pro X allows you to be productive on the go, whether that’s using Excel to enter data or Word to review documents. The Pro X offers a revolutionary new storage mechanism for your pen so you’ll always have it handy when you need it. Office leverages the fact that the Pro X knows when the pen is removed from its storage to automatically bring your inking tools front and center.
In addition, Office will now showcase everything you can do with your Surface accessories within each app, whether that’s the Surface Pen, Earbuds, or the Dial. If there are new capabilities available in an Office app you’re using, they will be displayed, so you always know you’re getting the best out of your Office + Surface combination.
Support for reacting to the Surface Pen being removed from its storage location is available now in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Office 365 subscribers. Surface tips in Office will first be available in PowerPoint desktop, alongside the general availability of the Earbuds.
Listening to customers to improve the ink in PowerPoint experience
We recently announced a set of improvements to Office, including several additions to the overall inking experience in PowerPoint based directly on what we’ve heard from customers. This includes support for replaying pre-drawn ink in Slide Show, myriad improvements sourced primarily from educators who ink in Slide Show on Windows and Mac to teach their classes, and the beginning of bringing ink to Office for the Web, starting in PowerPoint Slide Show.
We’re happy to announce that all these capabilities are now rolling out to everyone.
New templates for Microsoft Whiteboard
Microsoft Whiteboard helps you collaborate more effectively—whether you’re trying to brainstorm your next big idea or get everyone on the same page. New templates for Whiteboard can help you run more effective meetings with KANBAN sprint planning, SWOT analysis, project planning, learning, and more.
re-created layouts provide an immediate structure, so you don’t have to start from scratch. They’re perfect for collaboration scenarios like ad-hoc brainstorms, running meetings, and project planning. The Whiteboard canvas also dynamically expands to fit all your content. Read more about the new Microsoft Whiteboard templates.
Microsoft Whiteboard templates are in public preview for Windows 10 and rolling out to iOS this week. To add templates, click or tap the Insert button in the toolbar.
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