Some Of The Features Coming In The Microsoft Office vNext Revealed

Recently, Microsoft Office team sent an invitaion to users who are interested in trying out Office vNext. Microsoft will be offering new builds and access to associated cloud services in the coming weeks. In the recent private build Microsoft shared to these testers, the following new features were included. It was also revealed that Microsoft has made Office 365 subscription as a mandatory to try out the early access builds.

Word:

• Tell Me – One of the key ways Tell Me saves you time is by allowing you to use intuitive language to find the commands you need. When you start typing in the Tell Me box, you don’t have to stop and try to remember what something is called officially in the app. For example, when you want to mark your document as confidential, just type “confidential” or “confidential banner” and Tell Me will bring back the “Insert Watermark” command. Also, Tell Me uses “word-wheeling” which enables it to start showing results as soon as you start typing. With every keystroke the results are modified and refined. This means that you might use just a few letters to get to the desired command.
• Insert images with the correct orientation. Automatic image rotation – Most digital cameras record metadata to reflect the position of the camera when a picture was taken. This fix uses this metadata set the image rotation properly in the core Office applications. On insert this automatically rotates the picture to match the camera’s orientation. You can manually rotate the image to any position after insertion.
• Enable pan and zoom while loading large Charts/SmartArt – : charts and SmartArt diagrams will show up after text so that user can interact with the documents earlier than previous versions of Office. Chart and SmartArt diagrams will first appear as placeholders (grayish rectangle with circular dots, see left). The duration of appearance for placeholders depends on the capability of the device; they would stay on longer for tablets than workstations. Meanwhile, users can modify documents before charts and SmartArt diagrams fully rendered.

Excel:

• BI in Excel – The Excel Data Model, also sometimes referred to as the Power Pivot model, will be automatically and silently upgraded to a version that is only fully supported in Excel versions moving forward, when the structure of the model is changed in any way (adding new tables to the model, creating new relationships, modifying model calculations, etc.).  While the file will still open in prior versions of Excel, the interactive features of the data model, including refresh, edit, and query, will not be supported.

Project:

• Timeline View – Multiple Timeline Bars and Custom Date Ranges – Timeline View – We’ve improved the timeline view in Microsoft Project so you can now have multiple timeline bars in a single view and you can set the date range for timeline bars so they can just represent a specific phase of your project.

Visio:

• Accessibility (Keyboard access for Shape Panel) in Visio – Visio shape panel is now easily accessible via Keyboard. F6 cycles into the shape panel, TAB cycles through the different sections of the shape panel. Arrow keys allow users to navigate between the individual elements. Ctrl + TAB will allow users to quickly switch between STENCILS and SEARCH views.
• Content Refresh in Visio – The Building Plan and Electrical stencils have been refreshed with new shapes.
• Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files – Visio files now participate in the Information Rights Management (IRM) features, which provide persistent online and offline protection of e-mail messages and attachments, documents and diagrams.
  Sensitive information such as confidential product information, financial and sales process visuals, research and patent information, and customer and employee information exist in Visio diagrams.
• Visio Getting Started Feature – Visio introduces a new way for users to get started with their diagrams more quickly. Visio diagramming can be intimidating for someone who is new to Visio and not used to the rich set of tools offered. It may get confusing on how to start with the diagram creation process.

Common:

• Attaching/Sharing Most Recently Used (MRU) local and cloud files on OneDrive (Consumer and Business) and SharePoint – The insert attachments experience is now more optimized for quickly and efficiently sharing the files that matter as well as enabling collaboration scenarios both on touch and mouse. Users are now able to select from a dropdown of their most recently used local files and roaming OneDrive and SharePoint Office documents when they go to attach a file from the Ribbon or Action Bar. For files already in OneDrive (personal & for business) or SharePoint, they can easily choose to share them as an edit or view only link instead of as a classic attachment — thus enabling collaboration on one copy of a document instead of several.
• Black Theme – Black Theme – In Office 2013, we revamped the user interface UI and added some fresh, modern themes. Most customers loved our new look, but many customers missed the darker theme we had in the previous version.

Outlook:

• Lean Outlook storage footprint on small devices– Enable Smaller Sync Slider Window – By default, on small devices Outlook syncs down a month of email. Previously, that was the least email you could download. With this fix, you can now select the following additional values through account settings