Microsoft to launch Office 2016 today

Microsoft today is rolling out its much-awaited Office 2016, the latest addition to its cloud-based subscription service Office 365. World over, more than 1.2 billion people use MS Office for working on a simple word document to running billion dollar enterprises.

According to industry experts, the new Office bundle would have new versions of desktop apps for Windows including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and Access. The new applications are believed to offer more collaborative features.

Experts also say that the new Office also integrates with Microsoft's Skype conferencing service and its Bing search engine. It would be coming with features such as co-authoring which allows more than one user to work on a document simultaneously.

Also getting rid of the ever so annoying Office assistant ‘Clippy’ that is part of the older version of the software, Office 365 will feature ‘Tell Me’ which would be present in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Project, Visio, and Access. Experts believe that this new feature understands the problems users face in a better manner and solve them accordingly.

Office 2016 is the first major Office update for Windows computers since 2013. In the last few months, the company has released a series of new Office apps for iPhones, iPads and Android devices, as well as Mac computers.

As part of its new strategy, to be the segment leader and also to have steady revenue stream, Microsoft would be selling the new Office 2016 as part of an online subscription service, known as Office 365 as opposed to its earlier practice of selling a onetime upload software desktops.

Microsoft India’s MD Karan Bajwa, Alok Lall, director digital and social media marketing and Tyler Bryson, GM Marketing and operations would be unveiling the product in the Capital today.

With this new version of the Office, the company hopes to fight competition which it is facing from players such as Google who offer bundled software called Drive suite. Also open source softwares such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice offers several features similar to MS Office at no cost.

Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd.