Until recently, video was made by a few professionals while the rest of us felt it was too hard, required too much artistic ability, or took too long to make something that probably wasn’t all that good or didn’t meet our professional quality bar. That has changed. More and more of us are feeling we can make watchable, useful, or fun videos the way we might have typed an email before or snapped a photo. Video is establishing itself as a new type of ‘document’ for business, big and small, used inside and outside organizations to pitch an idea, explain a process, or communicate with team members.

Create videos with confidence with Microsoft and Clipchamp

Clipchamp is an in-browser video creation and editing experience founded in 2013 with a mission to empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing. The Clipchamp team is dedicated to making a video app they would personally love and are proud to have the world use as well. Clipchamp’s technical approach is to combine the simplicity of a web app with the ability to process video using the full computing power of a PC with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, something that was formerly limited to traditional video applications.

Clipchamp’s template-driven, task-focused user experience gives everyone the confidence that they can create. Its rich library of filters, styles, transitions, and stock media combined with the power of a multi-track audio and video compositing editor gives everyone the fine control they need, and artistic help if they need it, to create exactly what they want, quickly and with confidence. Once you finish your story, Clipchamp helps you share it since it’s built for social media, offering output styles and aspect ratios for all the popular social networks. It lets you tell your story your way.

Small business owners, marketers, influencers, students, educators, families, and information workers of all types need the capability to make great videos with minimal effort. Whether it’s a 10-second social media ad, a 2-minute pitch for a product, or a 20-minute instructional video, Clipchamp and Microsoft will provide the tools and experience you need.

As a web app that uses the full power of your PC, Clipchamp is a natural fit to extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 for individuals, families, schools, and businesses. It’s also a great fit for Microsoft Windows, which is a platform for boundless creativity. Whether you are editing game clips, making a school project, putting together a memory of your kids, or assembling the next indie short, Clipchamp and Microsoft will help you express yourself through the emotional power of video. If you are already a Clipchamp user, it’s all going to get better with more options, more power, and the easy creation experience you love.

I am bubbling over with excitement that Clipchamp will be joining Microsoft. The Clipchamp team is a creative powerhouse dedicated to quality and great customer outcomes, and we welcome them wholeheartedly as kindred spirits. We will be doing incredible things together—more to come on that later!

In the meantime, give Clipchamp a try, give us your feedback, and expect great things as we work to empower creators everywhere to express themselves through video.

The post Microsoft acquires Clipchamp to empower creators appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

This month, we have new features and capabilities designed to help keep your business moving during COVID-19 and beyond. New capabilities in Microsoft Teams, for instance, help you host more effective, inclusive, and focused online meetings and offer virtual solutions for one-on-one consultations. A crisis management site in SharePoint helps your organization quickly share information during emergencies. And an improved search experience in Outlook allows you to quickly find what you need in your email and calendar.

Below, we will get into all the Microsoft 365 news this month. But before we do, I want to once again point you to the monthly Modern Workplace podcast. This time, host Alex Bradley and I chat about what we’ve learned about remote work, both from our experiences at Microsoft and the experiences of our customers. Have a listen.

Host more inclusive, focused, online meetings

This month, we announced a host of new Teams capabilities that reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers, and bringing technological solutions to Firstline Workers and healthcare employees.

We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression minimizes distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.

In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

Conducting virtual meetings is a common requirement for situations such as healthcare patient consults, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.

Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and navigate more easily between ongoing conversations.

Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.

We’re also adding new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, delivers a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that’s simple to install and manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphones 700 UC will be available for purchase in late spring.

Finally, Microsoft 365 Business Voice in Teams is now available in the U.S., enabling small and mid-sized businesses to make and receive phone calls from anywhere. We also have a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that includes additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.

Check out new Microsoft 365 offerings for small and medium-sized businesses

This month, we debuted Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, an evolution from our Office 365 for individuals and families offering. We also announced named changes to several of our small and medium-sized business and Enterprise offerings. Office 365 Business Essentials is now Microsoft 365 Business Basic; Office 365 Business Premium is now Microsoft 365 Business Standard; and Microsoft 365 Business is now Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Meanwhile, Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will be called Microsoft 365 Apps. While today this is a change in name only, we’re excited about the new apps and services we’ve added to our subscriptions over the last few years and the new innovations we’ll be adding in the coming months. These changes reflect our ambition to continue to drive innovation in Microsoft 365 that goes well beyond what customers traditionally think of as Office.

Respond to emergency events

Quickly build an emergency management site to connect people and information—Unexpected events like COVID-19 highlight the importance of establishing and keeping the lines of communication open. A new crisis management site in SharePoint enables your organization to consolidate news, related resources, and topical Q&A in response to emergency events in under two hours. Just head to your SharePoint start page and select Create site > Communication site to start configuring news, links, Q&As, site navigation, highlighted people, and more.

Connect and collaborate with new app updates

We’re announcing new app updates to help streamline conversations, create professional content, and maximize productivity.

Engage with Yammer conversations directly within your inbox—The new interactive Yammer emails in Outlook on the web enable users to interact with Yammer conversations, polls, and questions, and deliver praise. Now you can see the full Yammer thread and reply, like, vote, attach files, share GIFs, and even watch videos right from your inbox. These features are now available to all Enterprise tenants with releases in Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook for iOS and Android coming next quarter.

Create professional-looking content more easily with Office mobile—You can now view and edit data in Excel in a simple, digestible card format, eliminating the need to span across columns that extend beyond the limits of the screen. Also new to Office mobile, PowerPoint Designer helps you create professional presentations with design, formatting, and iconography ideas for your content. These features will be available in the next few months in the Office app for Android and iOS.

Collaborate on documents and assign tasks—Now, users can easily assign tasks to document collaborators in Word and Excel for the web. Simply @mention your teammates in the comments of your online Word or Excel document, check the box to assign it, and they’ll receive an email letting them know a task was assigned to them with a link directly to the document. This feature will be available in April with Tasks in PowerPoint for the web coming in June.

Enjoy a new connection experience in Visio for the web—A new feature in Visio for the web lets users move the connection point on a shape for better alignment. Users can also easily add multiple arrows between shapes to distinctively represent to-and-from relationships, and more. To get started, hover over the edge of the shape until green circles highlight the possible connection points, then click on the desired point and drag the connector to the desired destination point. This feature is now available to all Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2 users.

Search your email and calendar more easily

We are announcing new innovations in Microsoft Search that recognize natural language as a helpful way to find what you need in Outlook for iOS and Android. Simply find your emails, calendar events, contact information, and files faster and easier by using everyday language to narrow your search. You can either speak it or type it. Learn more in this blog.

Streamline common IT tasks

This month, we’re announcing two new services to help streamline common resources for IT.

Modernize your print infrastructure with a cloud-based print solution—We’re announcing the private preview of Universal Print, a new cloud-based print infrastructure that creates a simple, secure print experience. Now, organizations no longer need to maintain on-premises print servers or install printer drivers on devices, reducing the time and effort needed by IT to maintain the print environment. And users get a straightforward print experience that makes it easy to discover and print to nearby printers. Customers can register for participation in the private preview.

Seamlessly move your cloud files into OneDrive and SharePoint—We’re pleased to announce that Mover, a cloud-to-cloud file migration tool, is now available to Microsoft 365 customers worldwide. Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers—including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive—into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services. Mover makes it easy and inexpensive (it’s free!) to manage files that currently exist outside of Microsoft 365 in other cloud service provider offerings. To get started, sign in with your Office 365 credentials and follow the prompts.

From new meetings capabilities in Teams to updates that make storing files on the cloud easier, the announcements above reflect our ongoing commitment to continuing to improve and evolve the tools you rely on. But we also want to be here for you at this critical moment when so many organizations are adjusting to full-time remote work. In addition to these monthly updates, we are using this blog as a space to exchange remote-work tips, information, and customer stories, so check back here for frequent updates.

The post Improve virtual meetings and bring consultations online—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in March appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The subscription service for your life to make the most of your time, connect, and protect the ones you love

Now more than ever, as many of us work and learn remotely, we’re acutely aware of all the different ways life can interrupt work and work can interrupt life. It’s never been more important to stay connected and on top of the things that matter. Over the past few weeks, we’ve shared what Microsoft is doing to help organizations, employees, teachers, parents, and students in these challenging times. And most recently we launched a new website for families to discover Microsoft tools and resources to help them connect, learn, and play at home. Aligned with our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, we want to help you and your family across work, school, and life.

Today, we offer a powerful set of free applications and services that help you create, share, connect, and collaborate with your friends and family across the web and on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices. Used by more than a half billion people, free Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive apps enable you to coauthor, video chat, organize, and come together. We are committed to improving and innovating on these experiences every day.

In addition, more than 38 million people subscribe to Office 365, which includes the modern, most up-to-date Office desktop apps, 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person (enough to store thousands of high res photos or hundreds of hours of videos), 60 Skype minutes to call mobile phones and landlines, advanced security to protect you from malware and phishing, and ongoing technical support.

Today, we are delighted to announce that on April 21^st, Office 365 will become Microsoft 365, the subscription for your life to help you make the most of your time, connect, and protect the ones you love, and to develop and grow. An evolution of Office 365, Microsoft 365 builds on the foundation of Office infusing new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences to empower you to become a better writer, presenter, designer, manager of your finances, and deepen your connection to the people in your life. These experiences start rolling out today and will reach the over 38 million Office 365 subscribers over the next few months.

In addition, today we unveiled two new Microsoft 365 experiences that will roll out in preview in the coming months—a new Microsoft Family Safety app designed to keep your family safe across the digital and physical worlds, and new features in Microsoft Teams that bring you closer to your friends and family to more deeply connect and collaborate on the things that matter most to you.

Finally, the new Microsoft Edge browser takes another step forward with new features to protect you on the web with Password Monitor, and to simplify research with Collections. You can learn more about all the new Edge features here.

Bring out your best writer with Microsoft Editor

Writing doesn’t come easy for many of us. In fact, our research shows that about half of us aspire to become better writers. That’s why today, we unveiled a major expansion to Microsoft Editor, an AI-powered service available in more than 20 languages, now accessible across Word and Outlook.com, and as a standalone browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Whether you’re writing a paper for school or updating your LinkedIn profile, Editor helps you put your best foot forward as you write.

Anyone can access the essential Editor capabilities, such as spelling and basic grammar across Word, Outlook.com, and the web. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers have access to advanced grammar and style refinements to write with more clarity and conciseness. Here are some of the exclusive ways Microsoft 365 subscribers can get even more from the Editor service:

• When you know what you want to say but can’t seem to find the “right” way to say it, just highlight a sentence and right-click for Rewrite Suggestions. Rewrite Suggestions in Word can offer ideas to help you rephrase sentences for more impact or clarity while staying true to your original meaning.
• For the first time ever in Word, Editor’s similarity checker leverages plagiarism-checking capabilities to support writers in creating original content and, when necessary, insert relevant citations right into their document with just a click. This tool allows writers to focus less on the mechanics of writing and more on the content. And teachers love that similarity checker helps students learn how to appropriately cite content.
• Additional style critiques including clarity, conciseness, formality, and inclusiveness assist Microsoft 365 subscribers to write with more confidence across documents, email, and the web. For example, the inclusive language critique can suggest refinements to help a writer avoid unintentional bias by suggesting a writer may want to try a term like “police officer” in place of “policeman.”

Become a better presenter in PowerPoint

One of the most common fears for people around the world is public speaking. Presenter Coach in PowerPoint can help. While you’re rehearsing, Presenter Coach uses AI to detect if you’re talking too fast, saying “umm” too much, or just reading the text from your slides.

Starting today, we’re introducing two new AI-powered features in PowerPoint Presenter Coach exclusively for Microsoft 365 subscribers—monotone pitch and speech refinement. With monotone pitch, Presenter Coach will listen to your tone of voice and give feedback in real-time to suggest adding some variation where needed. With speech refinement, Presenter Coach will give grammar suggestions including how to better phrase your speech. These new Presenter Coach features will be available to everyone through a free preview, and then eventually only to Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Kickstart your creativity in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Everyone would love to be more creative in their presentations and documents to better communicate their message, but often it takes more time than it’s worth. Now PowerPoint Designer helps you be more creative while saving you time. For example, with a simple click, you can transform text into a beautiful timeline. Or when you add a picture to your slide, Designer will auto-generate several slide layouts to choose from. To supercharge your creativity, we’re providing Microsoft 365 subscribers with exclusive access to over 8,000 beautiful images and 175 looping videos from Getty Images, plus 300 new fonts and 2,800 new icons to create high-impact and visually appealing documents. And you can use all this new content in Word and Excel too.

To kickstart your school, work, or family project and save time, Microsoft 365 subscribers also get exclusive access to 200+ new premium templates across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Find great templates to help you design the perfect resume, wedding invitation, newsletter, birth announcement, and so much more. There are even templates for printing coloring books and reward charts to keep kids engaged at home.

Seamlessly manage your finances with Money in Excel

Managing money is one of the top stressors among people and families. People typically track their spending across a variety of apps and spreadsheets. Today, we announced Money in Excel, a new solution for Microsoft 365 subscribers that makes it easy to manage, track, and analyze your money and spending all in one place—Excel.

Through a secure and simple process that connects to your bank and credit card accounts, including major retail banks and community credit unions, Money in Excel lets you import transactions and account balances automatically and customizes your workbook leveraging the rich features of Excel. It can help you improve your spending habits by providing personalized insights on how much you’re spending on categories like groceries each month and proactive alerts about price changes for recurring payments, bank fees, overdraft warnings, and more. Money in Excel gives you the tools to help you achieve your financial goals. Money in Excel will start to become available in the coming months in the U.S. first.

Explore subjects in detail with new data types and smart templates in Excel

Many people use Excel to track and analyze data to make decisions by creating everything from simple lists to elaborate models. Finding, collecting, organizing, and refreshing this data is challenging and time consuming. Today, we are announcing a different way to interact with your data. With new data types, you’ll be able to make sense of your data as Excel provides deeper meaning for over 100 topics. These include food, movies, places, chemistry, and even Pokémon. Save time by converting plain text and numbers into a data type and Excel will surface both rich visual and interactive data cards and images that provide a better representation of your data.

How does it work? Say you want to start keeping better track of your nutrition. Simply enter a food like “avocado” and by converting it to a Food data type, Excel will help you access its nutritional information. Or maybe your family is considering adopting a dog. You can evaluate different types of breeds using the Animal data type, which provides you with images, facts, and their temperaments, so you can easily create a table to compare them. With data types, all information can be easily updated, so you always have the latest and relevant data. Anyone can access the Stocks and Geography data types in Excel for the web. And Microsoft 365 subscribers have exclusive access to the over 100 new data types powered by Wolfram Alpha. As a Microsoft 365 subscriber, data types will give you the opportunity to:

• Easily gather, organize, and analyze the information you need in one place without the hassle of finding, copying, and refreshing the data.
• Use new smart templates with data types to do more. They will help you prepare to move to a new city, track your nutrition, or help your kids learn chemistry.

The new data types and smart templates will be available to Office Insiders this spring and to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers in English in the coming months.

Organize your time across work and life with Outlook

Juggling work meetings with personal appointments can be a struggle, particularly if your work and personal calendars aren’t connected. Today, we announced new features in Outlook on the web that help you manage all your commitments, across your work and life, in one place. With these new features, you can link your personal calendar to your work calendar to show your real availability in your work account, while still maintaining privacy around the details of personal appointments and business meetings.

We also announced the expansion of Play My Emails on Android—where Cortana provides an intelligent read-out of your emails. Play My Emails can help you catch up and act on what’s new in your inbox whether you are mid-commute or getting ready in the morning, so that you can be fully present when you are home. To further enable hands-free activities, you can now use Microsoft Search that recognizes natural language on iOS and Android. Simply find your results faster and easier by using language you use every day to filter and narrow your search—just speak it or type it. The new search functionality and Play My Emails availability on Android will begin rolling out in the coming months.

Deepen your connection to family and friends with Skype and Microsoft Teams

Staying connected with our loved ones has never been more important than it is right now. We’re pleased to offer tools like Skype to help people to stay in touch with family and friends through chat and video calling. Recently, we have seen significant increases in Skype usage. Skype has seen an increase in usage, with 40 million people using it daily, up 70 percent month over month and, we are seeing a 220 percent increase in Skype to Skype calling minutes month over month. To help people get connected even faster, we recently introduced a new feature in Skype called Meet Now. Meet Now lets you easily create video meetings in as little as three clicks for free, no signups or downloads required.

At work, every day more than 44 million people use Microsoft Teams. People love Teams because it’s the only hub for teamwork that lets you chat, do video conferencing, make calls, and collaborate all in one place. And while Teams is great for work, we’re all struggling to manage responsibilities across work and life. We use multiple apps and disconnected tools such as calendars, email, messaging, and documents to manage it all.

To provide one app to help manage work and life and deepen your connection with those who matter most, today we previewed new features coming to Microsoft Teams for your personal life.

With these new features coming to Teams, you can connect, stay organized, and collaborate with family and friends. Create groups to plan trips with friends; organize a neighborhood gathering or your next book club meeting. You’ll be able to connect in a group chat, make video calls, collaborate over shared to-do lists and assign tasks to specific people, coordinate schedules, share photos and videos, all in one place. Teams gives to you the tools to seamlessly manage daily life; share grocery lists, organize across family calendars, store important information like Wi-Fi passwords and account info, and even see location updates when loved ones arrive home or at other locations like work or school.

These new features are coming in preview to the Microsoft Teams mobile app in the coming months. In the meantime, we invite you to connect with friends and family through chat and video calling using Skype.

Protect your family in the physical and digital worlds with Microsoft Family Safety

Many parents use multiple screen-time apps and location-based services to help ensure their families are safe in the physical and digital worlds. Unveiled today, Microsoft Family Safety is a new mobile experience coming on iOS and Android for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Microsoft Family Safety empowers families to help protect their loved ones by giving them the tools and insights to start a conversation promoting healthier habits online and in the real world. The new Microsoft Family Safety app is the only app that manages screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox while also giving you peace of mind when your kids aren’t home.

Microsoft Family Safety helps you stay connected with location sharing and notifications when a family member arrives or departs a location like home, school, or work, to help give you the peace of mind that your family is where they need to be. And, for inexperienced drivers in the household, you can use driving reports to help build better habits behind the wheel with the peace of mind knowing that we don’t share your information with third parties, such as insurance companies.

You’ll also be able to help protect your kids as they explore and play games online and on their devices. The Microsoft Family Safety app helps you understand how your kids are spending their time across their Xbox, Windows 10 PCs, and Android phones, plus you can set limits to help promote healthy digital habits. Additionally, you’ll be able to help steer them away from content that you feel is not age appropriate as they start browsing the web.

We are starting with a limited preview of the app across iOS and Android that will be available in the coming months.

Access to popular wellbeing, creativity, and enrichment apps

Wellbeing, creativity, and enrichment play important roles in helping you be your best self. So, in addition to all the new value in the Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions, we announced that subscribers will receive limited-time access to popular apps and premium services such as Adobe, Bark, Blinkist, Creative Live, Experian, Headspace, and TeamSnap. In the U.S. these are valued at over $500 USD. Visit this page to learn more about the partner benefits program for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions broadly available on April 21—more value, same price

The new Office features start rolling out to current Office 365 customers today. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions will be available worldwide on April 21^st. With Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions you get everything in Office 365, like premium desktop Office apps, 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person, 60 Skype minutes for calling mobile phones and landlines, advanced security features to protect you from malware and phishing attacks, ongoing technical support, plus all the new features and benefits announced today. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 USD a month. For the best value, a family of up to six people can use Microsoft 365 Family for $9.99 USD a month.

To learn more about Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions as well as the market and language availability of the new features we announced, visit this page. For more information about the changes announced today that are coming to Microsoft 365 Business and Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise plans, visit this page here.

The post Introducing the new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Download for Android | Download for iOS

Hundreds of millions of people use Office to achieve more at work, home, and school. We know many people save rich document creation or editing for their computer or laptop and work on their phones in limited ways. We took this as a challenge for Office to find a better overall productivity experience that would change perceptions of how you could work on a mobile device to create an experience that was simpler, more integrated, harnessed the unique strengths of mobile devices, and truly put mobile needs at the forefront.

The Office app delivers several key benefits including:

• Combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a way that simplifies the experience with fewer apps to download or switch between. It requires far less phone storage than installing individual apps while maintaining virtually all the capabilities of the existing mobile apps people already know and use.
• Integrating our Lens technology to unlock the power of the camera with capabilities like converting images into editable Word and Excel documents, scanning PDFs, and capturing whiteboards with automatic digital enhancements to make the content easier to read.
• Adding new functionality for common tasks people often encounter when working on a phone—things like making quick notes, signing PDFs, scanning QR codes, and transferring files between devices.

Altogether, the Office app is a powerful tool that is intuitive and familiar yet still uniquely different.

We’ve been thrilled and humbled to see the response to the public preview of the Office app since introducing it at the Microsoft Ignite conference last November. After the announcement, tens of thousands of people immediately rushed to get the Android and iOS apps, causing us to hit the 10,000-user limit in Apple’s TestFlight program in just a few hours. The feedback we received through customer conversations, social media, and the press has been very positive and encouraging— with the Office app seen as part of a new wave of innovation for Office and Microsoft. This inspired us to work hard to get this app ready for full release as soon as we could.

We have made several enhancements since the public preview—such as support for third-party storage services including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud; templates to help you create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; and general performance improvements.

Today’s release is also available for download on Android tablets with limited support. The Office app for Android is fully optimized for tablets when working with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and we are committed to making the rest of the Android app as well as the iOS app fully optimized for tablets soon.

More features coming soon

But we’re not stopping here. We’re constantly thinking about ways to enrich the Office mobile experience to help people be more productive on a phone. We want people to think of the Office mobile experience as a tool they would turn to for content creation and more sophisticated work—not just for light editing and information consumption.

In the next few months, we’ll add three new exciting features that will help us deliver on that promise:

• Word Dictation—Let Word turn your voice into written text and use voice commands and simple toolbars to easily apply the right formatting and punctuation you need.

• Excel Cards View—View and edit data in an Excel table row in a simple, digestible card format so you do not have span across columns that extend beyond the limits of the screen.

• Outline to PowerPoint—Write your presentation content as a simple outline and let PowerPoint Designer turn it into presentable slides with the proper styling, formatting, and iconography of your content.

Get started with the Office app

Anyone can now download the Office app on phones for Android and iOS. The app is free to use, even without signing in. However, signing in with a Microsoft Account or connecting to a third-party storage service will enable you to access and store documents in the cloud. An Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscription will also unlock various premium features, consistent with those in the current Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps.

Download the Office app now and discover a whole new way to organize your work and get things done for work, for home, and for school.  

Download for Android | Download for iOS

The post The new Office app now generally available for Android and iOS appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

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 in November, alongside the 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 November in PowerPoint desktop for Office 365 subscribers.

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.

Ink Replay is available in PowerPoint for Windows and Mac for Office 365 subscribers.

Inking is now available in Slide Show mode in PowerPoint for the web. Inking in PowerPoint Editor on the web will be available by the end of the year.

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.

Pre-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.

The post Microsoft 365 makes work and play more intuitive and natural with innovations in voice, digital ink, and touch appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A journey worth taking

It’s been an exciting journey since we announced To Do. From shared-list task assignments, list groups, and file attachments, to the Mac app and even more product integrations, we took your feedback and created the app you wanted. We’re grateful for your input and the support of both our Wunderlist and To Do communities. We’ve come a long way since those first Wunderlist days and today is one more step in our evolution. Let’s take a closer look at To Do.

A fresh new feel

We polished the design of To Do by reducing the header size and adding in more color to give the app warmth and personalization. It’s still the simple and elegant app you love, but now with more options to customize, so you can tailor it to suit yourself and your lists. With the new version of To Do, you can choose from a wide range of backgrounds, including the beloved Berlin TV tower that was a feature in Wunderlist. In addition, you can choose a different background for every list.

Want to give your eyes a rest? To Do has dark mode across Android, Windows, Mac, and coming soon to iOS. It’s not just about the backgrounds, though. We freshened up the look of To Do, so it feels simple, yet modern.

Shareable link.

Your smart daily planner

Like Wunderlist, we have smart lists where you can see your planned or important tasks in one list. But what makes To Do unique is the personalized daily planner feature, My Day. It helps you accomplish what’s meaningful and important to you every day. Smart suggestions in My Day help you plan what you need to accomplish that day. And tomorrow? My Day will refresh, so you can start the day with a blank slate. Any tasks you didn’t complete will be waiting for you in suggestions.

Access your lists wherever you are

To Do is available and syncs across all platforms, including Mac, iOS, Android, Windows, and the web. Now, wherever you are, you can take your lists with you. Commuting to work? Plan your day on your phone so you start work ready to check off all those tasks. And if you’re on Windows or Android, you can toggle between your work and personal accounts. As you head out the office in the evening, you can leave your work lists behind, and open up your grocery list or see what’s in store for movie night on your personal account.

Part of the Microsoft family

With To Do, we’re on a mission to bring everything you need to do—from anywhere tasks appear in your favorite Microsoft 365 apps and services—into one centralized view. Flag messages you need to follow up on and see them in the Flagged Email list (with Microsoft work or school accounts or Microsoft-hosted email accounts like Outlook, Hotmail, or Live). The Assigned to Me list shows you the tasks assigned to you in your shared lists and those from Microsoft Planner. From there you can add them to My Day to give you a holistic view of what you need to do today. But that’s not all—with our Cortana integration, you can also add tasks from your Amazon Echo.* Love Microsoft Launcher on Android? Guess what! To Do is integrated there too.

Security is top of mind

Security is paramount to us and you’ll be pleased to know that we made your data security a priority in To Do. Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security helps protect your data wherever it may be. With To Do, you can set up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to help make sure your lists are secured.

Get started today!

Now’s the best time to dive in and give To Do a try. We believe that once you do, you’ll love it! To help the process, we made moving your lists and tasks as easy as possible. It’s a snap to import your lists into To Do, so go ahead and click or tap the Download To Do button to get started.

Microsoft To Do

Your day in focus.

Download To Do

If you don’t already have a Microsoft account, you can register with your existing email address (for example, Gmail). As soon as you sign in, the option to import your tasks from Wunderlist is displayed, or you can find it in Settings. Just start importing and you’ll be ready to get started with To Do.

Learn more about the migration experience.

Final thoughts

We want to express our heartfelt thanks to you—our Wunderlist and To Do fans. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what you think would make To Do even better, so please keep the feedback coming via Twitter and Facebook. We wouldn’t have gotten here without you, and we look forward to continuing this journey together!

*Cortana integration is available in English and the following regions: Australia, India, U.S., and U.K. The Cortana skill is still in Preview, so it’s currently only available in U.S. English with personal Microsoft accounts.

The post Announcing the new version of Microsoft To Do—we’ve come a long way! appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re also increasing the OneDrive standalone storage plan from 50 GB to 100 GB at no additional charge, and we’re giving Office 365 subscribers a new option to add more storage as they need it.

OneDrive Personal Vault

OneDrive runs on the trusted Microsoft cloud, which has many security measures in place to keep your files safe. But we understand that some people want more protection for their most important and sensitive files, which is why we’re introducing Personal Vault.

Personal Vault is a protected area in OneDrive that you can only access with a strong authentication method or a second step of identity verification, such as your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a code sent to you via email or SMS.¹ Your locked files in Personal Vault have an extra layer of security, keeping them more secured in the event that someone gains access to your account or your device.

Plus, this added security doesn’t mean added inconvenience. All your documents, photos, and videos in Personal Vault are easy to access on Onedrive.com, your PC, or capable devices.²

Personal Vault adds to the robust privacy and security that OneDrive currently offers, including file encryption at rest and in transit, suspicious activity monitoring, ransomware detection and recovery, mass file deletion notification and recovery, virus scanning on download for known threats, and version history for all file types.

Easy to use

Just enter a PIN, or use your fingerprint, face, or a code delivered by email or SMS¹ to unlock and access your files—no need to remember multiple passwords. Additionally, Personal Vault can be unlocked with the Microsoft Authenticator app. Whichever way you choose, unlocking is quick, convenient, and helps secure your data.

Scan and shoot directly into Personal Vault

You can use the OneDrive for mobile app to scan documents, take pictures, or shoot video directly into your Personal Vault, keeping them off less secure areas of your device—such as your camera roll. It’s easy to scan important travel, identification, vehicle, home, insurance documents, and more directly into your Personal Vault. And you’ll have access to these documents wherever you go, across your capable devices.²

Extra protection on and off your PC

Personal Vault uses more than just two-step verification to help keep your files safe and private. On Windows 10 PCs, OneDrive syncs your Personal Vault files to a BitLocker-encrypted area of your local hard drive. And like all files in OneDrive, the contents of your Personal Vault are encrypted at-rest in the Microsoft cloud and in-transit to your device. For further protection on mobile devices, we recommend that you enable encryption on your iOS or Android device. Together, these measures help keep your files protected even if your Windows 10 PC or mobile device is lost, stolen, or someone gains access to it.

Automatic locking after a short period of inactivity

Personal Vault automatically relocks on your PC, device, or online after a short period of inactivity. Once locked, any files you were using will also lock and require reauthentication to access. There’s no need to worry about whether you left your Personal Vault or your file open—both will close and lock automatically after inactivity.³

Available soon

We’re excited to provide these new capabilities to people who use OneDrive on the web, with our mobile app, or on a Windows 10 PC. Personal Vault will begin rolling out soon in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada and will be available to everyone by the end of the year.

If you already have OneDrive, Personal Vault will appear as a feature update when it launches later this year in your region. And if you aren’t yet a OneDrive customer, you can download the app or go to www.onedrive.com to start using it on your PC or on the web. If you are using OneDrive’s free or standalone 100 GB plan, you can try Personal Vault with a limited number of files. Office 365 subscribers can store as many files as they want in Personal Vault, up to their storage limit.

OneDrive gets additional storage

Today, we’re also excited to share two storage plan updates.

Store more with OneDrive 100 GB plan—We’re increasing the amount of storage in the OneDrive standalone plan from 50 GB to 100 GB⁴ for the same $1.99 per month. That’s enough space to store over 50,000 pictures (at 2 MB per photo). This new plan is perfect for automatically backing up your phone’s camera roll and scanning and saving documents, receipts, and more right from your phone. You can also use it to back up your files and share and collaborate on documents. This new plan will roll out soon. If you’re currently using our 50 GB plan, you’ll automatically get 50 GB more storage added to your account at no additional cost. For more information, see OneDrive plans.

Get additional OneDrive storage as you need it—Your Office 365 subscription starts with 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and many people have asked for even more storage. Today, we’re announcing OneDrive additional storage, which lets you add more storage—as you need it—to your existing Office 365 subscription. You can add storage in 200 GB increments starting at $1.99 per month, going up to 1 TB of additional storage for $9.99 per month.

If you need 2 TB of storage, we now have an option for you. Pay only for what you need and increase, decrease, or cancel your additional storage plan anytime. OneDrive additional storage will be available in the coming months wherever Office 365 is available.

Let us know what you think

To let us know what you think or share your thoughts and ideas, visit OneDrive UserVoice. To learn more about all the advanced protection features included in Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscriptions, see our support page.

Notes
¹ Face and fingerprint verification requires specialized hardware including a Windows Hello capable device, fingerprint reader, illuminated IR sensor, or other biometric sensors and capable devices.
² The OneDrive for mobile app on Android and iOS requires either Android 6.0 or above or iOS 11.3 and above.
³ Automatic locking interval varies by device and can be set by the user.
⁴ 100 GB plan offers 102,400 MB of storage.

The post OneDrive Personal Vault brings added security to your most important files and OneDrive gets additional storage options appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A few years ago, the PowerPoint team took a bet on artificial intelligence (AI) and started the PowerPoint Designer effort. We aspired to help our customers overcome some of the fear around building an effective slide by offering up suggested slide designs. We started with making photo slides compelling, eventually adding capabilities around transforming text slides into their more visual—and hopefully impactful—counterparts like process diagrams and timelines. More recently, we started complementing text with iconography.

Today, we’re excited to share that not only have we hit a major milestone in PowerPoint Designer usage, we’re also announcing new Designer capabilities that suggests high quality content to jumpstart authoring and provides perspective suggestions for quantitative content. And yes, in a “but wait, there’s more” moment, we’re ready to share that our AI effort is moving beyond Designer—with our new Presenter Coach—intended to help our users build confidence in their presenting abilities.

Designer in PowerPoint crosses the 1 billion slides mark

Every day Designer offers up millions of slide suggestions to PowerPoint users. When someone chooses to insert a design suggestion, we know we’ve provided them value. In fact, the adoption rate of these slides has grown astronomically over the last few years, and in April 2019, we reached a major milestone of 1 billion slides created with Designer since launch!

Building on our momentum, today we’re announcing several new capabilities in Designer that allow people in large enterprises, and small and medium-sized businesses, to use branded templates and support those who don’t have a branded template to get started quickly with theme ideas. These new capabilities are designed to help people make effective slides and presentations with minimal time and effort while staying in their creative flow.

Get intelligent design recommendations and stay on brand with Designer for branded templates

One of our biggest asks from customers has been to make Designer work seamlessly with a company’s branded templates. With the launch of Designer for branded templates, companies can now make sure the design recommendations people see meet their corporate branding and visual identity guidelines.

Shareable video.

When working with branded templates, Design Ideas that people see are created directly from the layouts in the Slide Master, using the content on the user’s slides. Designer’s AI chooses the most suitable layouts for the content, intelligently crops images, and automatically recommends relevant icons and pictures. Organizations can design their templates for optimal Designer support, broadening the choices available to their users.

In today’s fast-paced work environments, people are pressed for time, and AI-powered features like Designer help people create visually engaging and immersive presentations with only a few clicks. Now users can get this streamlined experience while working with their organizations’ templates, using branded layouts instead of needing to improvise. Designer for branded templates is currently available to Office 365 Insiders subscribers for Windows 10 and Mac.

Easily create beautiful decks from scratch with Designer theme ideas

For people who don’t have a branded template but want to get started quickly and easily, we’re introducing theme ideas in Designer. Now getting a presentation started is easier than ever. When you open a blank presentation and enter words onto the slide, Designer recommends a selection of new high quality photographs that reflect the slide text, along with theme styles and complementary colors. These photos are fully licensed for commercial use and are coupled with one of PowerPoint’s high quality themes and a corresponding color palette to easily create visually impactful presentations with minimal effort.

Designer theme ideas is rolling out now in PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, and on the web for Office 365 subscribers.

Make data easily understood by adding Designer perspectives to your slides

Presenting data in slide decks can be challenging because people have difficulty conceptualizing large and unfamiliar measurements. Studies published by Microsoft Research have shown that adding relatable references for large numerical values makes information easier to understand and increases retention. That’s why we added this capability into PowerPoint Designer!

Thanks to an integration with Microsoft Research’s Perspective Engine, Designer can now recognize when a slide contains a large number that might be difficult to interpret and put into context by automatically augmenting the text with a corresponding perspective. With the additions of perspectives, Designer makes numerical slides more digestible and helps presenters effectively convey their information. For example: The size of Afghanistan, which is 652,232 km², is hard to interpret, but adding that it’s “about equal to the size of Texas” makes it easily understandable. These relative measurements are now automatically surfaced in Designer.

Designer perspectives is currently rolling out to Office 365 subscribers. Designer perspectives is currently available for English only.

Nail your next presentation with Presenter Coach in PowerPoint for the web

From classrooms to boardrooms, our belief is that everyone can improve how they present. Training and feedback help people gain confidence and empower them to achieve their personal and professional goals. Over the last few years, we’ve received feedback from educators, students, and customers that people want an easy way to practice their presentations to improve their public speaking abilities.

Today, we’re announcing the upcoming availability of Presenter Coach in PowerPoint. Presenting in front of a live audience is a vital life skill. Based on academic research and field studies, we’ve integrated presentation best practices into Presenter Coach to help people give more effective presentations.

Shareable video.

This feature allows you to enter rehearsal mode and while speaking you receive on-screen guidance about pacing, inclusive language, use of filler words, and culturally insensitive phrases. It even lets you know when you’re just reading off the slide. At the end of each rehearsal session, a detailed report with metrics for additional practice is provided. Presenter Coach will be available on PowerPoint for the web later this summer.

We’re excited to release these new capabilities to our customers and look forward to your continued feedback to help us improve PowerPoint. Thanks for your help along our incredible journey.

The post PowerPoint AI gets an upgrade and Designer surpasses a major milestone of 1 billion slides appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Quickly capture paper-based data to unlock new insights

To help you bring analog data into Excel, we developed the Insert Data from Picture feature, which became available for Android this past March, and as of today, is now generally available for iOS with the iPhone Excel app. Also, starting today, the feature will support 21 languages on both iOS and Android. With this feature, you can easily grab any data in a table format—financial spreadsheets, work schedules, task lists, timetables, and so on—and convert it to a digital format in Excel, so you can arrange and analyze that information quickly and in context to make better decisions on the fly.

The Insert Data from Picture feature works by combining advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology, layout understanding techniques, and machine learning models to transform paper-based information into digital data. We’ve used these and other technologies across Office apps, including the PDF Reflow feature for Word and Office Lens and in the Seeing AI app.

Read more about the Insert Data from Picture feature in this article.

Insert Data from Picture is now available in 21 Latin languages.

Convert handwritten notes to digital text with ease

Let’s look at how we’re helping users go from analog to digital. Before, you had to copy whiteboard notes by hand at the end of meetings. Later, you could take photos of whiteboards with your phone. Either way, you still had to type in the notes later. Now, with ink grab you can take a picture of notes scribbled on a physical whiteboard, convert them to digital ink in the Microsoft Whiteboard app, and continue brainstorming with others on the digital canvas. We also built handwriting recognition into tools like OneNote, so you can convert notes to text quickly to share in messages, documents, or presentations.

We’re also exploring more advanced ways to help you convert analog data to digital information that you can use across your Office apps. For example, we envision that you’ll be able to take a picture of handwritten notes on paper and import the text directly. Other areas we’re exploring include scanning a picture, PDF annotation, and signing.

Analyzing the physical world

In addition to importing data from a physical piece of paper, there are many other ways we see customers leveraging Excel to help them analyze data from the real world. For example, with the Hacking STEM program, teachers use Excel to help students explore and analyze real-world phenomena. Leveraging the Excel Data Streamer add-in, students can easily move data from the physical world in and out of Excel—introducing them to data science and the internet of things (IoT)—for example, using pressure sensors to measure brain impact during a concussion.

Brain impact workbook using Data Streamer in Excel.

At Microsoft, we’re dedicated to finding ways to build artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning models into user apps to help you be more productive and stay focused on critical deliverables instead of mundane tasks.

Download the Excel iPhone app today. To learn more about Insert Data from Picture, read this article and watch this Inside Excel episode.

Availability note: You can find the list of all the languages Insert Data from Picture supports in this article.

The post Take your analog data digital for a faster, more efficient way to work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We are excited to announce that earlier this week we released an update to Office that reflects these principles.

Office is a connected experience

The way we use technology to be productive at work and at home is changing. We work more on the go, we use more than one device to complete our tasks, and we often collaborate as part of a team—even when that team is our family and friends. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing you with the best-in-class applications and experiences to meet these modern needs, while respecting your privacy and keeping you in control of your data.

We continue to introduce new and exciting capabilities to Office to help you create, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Sometimes it’s as simple as helping you find a document you wrote a week ago, or helping you find the perfect image for a school report. Or maybe your team needs to collaborate and communicate on a project in real-time across different devices. Office can help you create professional-looking presentations by suggesting design layouts for your PowerPoint slides, and it can also help you find key insights in complex data sets.

To deliver these experiences, Office uses the power of the Microsoft Cloud. Like any other connected service or website, required service data must be shared between your computer and Microsoft to enable these features.

For example: Perhaps you would like PowerPoint to provide live subtitles as you present and even translate your words into a different language. To transcribe and translate your spoken words, PowerPoint sends a recording of your voice to our Speech and Translation service, where it’s automatically machine transcribed and translated. The generated text is returned to your computer, so that PowerPoint can display it on the screen in (almost) real-time. Your voice and words are used only to do the transcription and translation you’ve asked us to do.

If you want to learn more about which connected experiences are available to you in Office, please read Connected experiences in Office.

You’re in control of cloud connected experiences

We understand the importance of keeping you and your organization in control of connected experiences when working in Office apps. With this update, you now have settings that allow you to disable or re-enable the following types of connected experiences, including:

• Experiences that analyze your content. Experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Editor in Word.
• Experiences that download online content. Experiences that allow you to search and download online content, including templates, images, 3D models, videos, and reference materials to enhance your documents. For example, Office templates or PowerPoint QuickStarter.
• Other connected experiences. Experiences such as document collaboration can be also turned off by disconnecting the Office desktop apps from the Microsoft Cloud.

Some services are essential to how Office apps function and cannot be turned off. For example: syncing your mailbox in Outlook, authenticating and verifying your Office license, and determining if Office is up to date.

Although these improvements have come to Office on Windows first, in the coming months, similar controls and experiences will be introduced in Office on other platforms.

If Office is connected to your work or school account, your IT administrator is empowered to make choices about which connected experiences are available to you in your organization. To learn more about improvement to the IT controls and the options available, please see Overview of privacy controls for Office 365 ProPlus.

Keeping Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected

Our customers choose Office because of its strong track record of capability, quality, security, reliability, and compatibility. Just as with our cloud-backed experiences, we use data to keep the Office apps secure, up to date, performing as expected, and to make product improvements.

For this purpose, we collect diagnostic data to detect, diagnose, and rapidly address issues before they become large-scale problems or cause security risks. If one of our apps runs too slowly, or has some other error, we want to know about it as quickly as possible, so we can work on fixing it. This diagnostic data helps us keep your Office working the way it should.

Consistent with the data collection framework outlined in Julie’s blog, there are two levels of diagnostic data for Office desktop applications:

• Required data—The minimum data necessary to help keep Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected on the device it’s installed on. For example, required data is collected when we update Office on your device. To ensure the update packages are downloaded and installed correctly, we collect information about the success (or failure) of this operation. Or when you add a new email account to Outlook, we collect required diagnostic data about the success of adding this new account. Increased rates of failure could indicate a change made by your email provider or regression in support of this provider in our software.
• Optional data—This is data that is collected in addition to required data and only with your consent. If collected, optional data helps us detect, diagnose, and fix issues even faster; and it helps us make improvements to meet your productivity needs now and in the future. Optional data, for example, is collected on whether files are saved locally or in the cloud; this helps us to better understand our customers’ storage preferences. Or tracking the number of times a feature is used to better understand the ways our customers interact with new Office features. We generally use optional diagnostic data to learn about the preferences across a large set of customers. We continually work to improve Office to make it work better for you and the rest of our customers. We appreciate you choosing to provide optional diagnostic data to make this possible.

For more information about diagnostic data in Office, and how to control which category you provide, see Diagnostic data in Office. If you’re using a work or school account, your IT administrator will have additional options to disable collection of diagnostic data and may have made some choices about options available to you.

Regardless of whether you stay with required data or opt in to optional data, the diagnostic data we receive doesn’t include your name or email address, the content of your files, or information about apps unrelated to Office. We take great precautions to ensure your privacy, including how we handle your diagnostic data. Our system creates a unique alphanumeric ID that it associates with the diagnostic data before it leaves your computer. Although unique, this ID by itself cannot be mapped back to any individual person. We use this ID to help us differentiate between an issue happening on 100 different devices or 100 instances of the same issue happening on a single device.

We want to be open and transparent about the data we collect to detect, diagnose, and fix issues. We created a free Diagnostic Data Viewer, where you can see the diagnostic data sent to Microsoft. For details, read Using the Diagnostic Data Viewer with Office.

Office is built on trust

Julie’s blog announced a new framework and emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to trust and privacy. This update to Office embodies these principles.

Making our privacy experience and controls clear and helpful is critical to building and keeping your trust in our products and services. Many experiences you’re seeing in this update to Office are the result of many hours of conversations and research with customers like you. We’ll continue to learn and improve our product behaviors and user experience as we receive more input. Your feedback will be important in helping us deliver future privacy-related updates.

It’s our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We can only accomplish that by earning your confidence that we respect you, your data, and your privacy.

The post Microsoft Office brings you new privacy controls appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

When Microsoft invited me and my twin brother Nathan to come to Redmond to its film studios to participate in a “challenge,” we had no idea what we were getting into. They told us it would be fun and all we had to do was be ourselves. Always up for a challenge, we took the offer and, when we got there, found out we’d be competing against each other, but not in a way we ever had before.

We were given a handful of tasks to complete using two different versions of Excel. Nathan had Excel for Office 2019 and I had Excel for Office 365. Neither of us even knew there were different versions of Excel, much less how one would compete against the other.

As it turns out, I smoked Nathan at all the tasks, thanks to the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and a feature called Data Types in Excel for Office 365.

Since that time, I’ve been using Excel for Office 365 in new ways and thought it would be a shame to keep all these newfound skills I’ve learned from Microsoft to myself.

Here are some of my favorite time-savers:

1. Data types in Excel—This is a super cool research tool. While you can see me use it to add the capitals, population, and largest cities for all 50 states in the U.S. in almost no time (seriously, I embarrassed my brother with this one), I’ve been using it lately to track my stock investments. I can easily see a range of data on all my positions with a simple click, letting me identify trends and (hopefully) make better investing decisions. My friends at Microsoft told me there will be more data types rolled out in the future, so keep an eye on this one to see what it will do next.

2. Ideas—Identify trends, patterns, and outliers in a data set and understand your numbers in seconds with Ideas, which is basically like having a data guru look at your numbers and provide suggestions as to what it could indicate—all without having to have the guru! Ideas also helps you graphically display your data in the best chart or graph format for the data type. To get Ideas, click the lightning bolt icon in the top right corner of the ribbon under the Home tab.

3. Dynamic Arrays—This one is a little complex, but it takes something that was really complex before and makes it much easier. If you struggle to filter data to find actionable insights, Dynamic Arrays will make you feel like a data-slicing pro. You can filter, sort, and single out data without writing a bunch of custom formulas. Using Dynamic Arrays, any formula that returns an array of values will seamlessly “spill” into neighboring unoccupied cells, making it as easy to get an array of values returned as it is to work on a single cell. There are a bunch of new functions that make it easy to build spreadsheets that would previously have been nearly impossible. Joe McDaid, senior program manager at Microsoft, explains it way better than I can.

4. Threaded comments—Long-time Excel users know how important this feature is. It used to be difficult to leave a comment on a specific cell of a workbook. Now using @mentions and nested replies, you can easily follow conversations taking place around content in a cell and directly interact with coworkers. Along with the ability to coauthor in real-time, it’s so much easier to work in spreadsheets with multiple collaborators and make edits from any device. While I think this is awesome for Excel, it also works in Word and PowerPoint, should you be so inclined.

5. Coming soon: Insert Data from Picture—This one is just between us, but I had to share it. When I was at Microsoft, I got a preview of a feature that’s in the works that you should look out for soon (early spring 2019). How many times have you been in a meeting and someone has drawn a concept on a whiteboard that has to be manually re-created in Excel? You don’t have to retype that data anymore! No really, you don’t have to retype it. You can simply use the Insert Data from Picture feature. Excel takes the contents of the picture and converts it into cells. Click. Boom. Done!

And, these are just a handful of my favorite features in Excel for Office 365. If you want to try them out but don’t have Office 365, you can get a free trial and give it a test run.

Note: Ideas, Dynamic Arrays, and Insert Data from Picture are available in preview to Office 365 subscribers enrolled in the Office Insiders program.

The post Excel with Microsoft Excel in Office 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Office 365 provides experiences tailored to the Mac and macOS, like Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, OneDrive Files on Demand, and Touch Bar support on the MacBook Pro. And it’s connected to the cloud, so you can access your content from any device, coauthor with anyone around the world in real-time, and use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create more impactful content with less effort. The result is an experience that is unmistakably Office but designed for Mac.

“We are excited to welcome Microsoft Office 365 to the all new Mac App Store in macOS Mojave. Apple and Microsoft have worked together to bring great Office productivity to Mac users from the very beginning. Now, with Office 365 on the Mac App Store, it’s easier than ever to get the latest and best version of Office 365 for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.”
—Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

You can view Apple’s announcement on today’s news in their Newsroom.

Download Office 365 from the Mac App Store.*

*It may take up to 24 hours for the app bundle to appear in all regions on the Mac App Store.

The post Office 365 for Mac is available on the Mac App Store appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Starting today, we’re bringing this experience to Windows 10 in the form of an app, simply called Office. It’s now available to Windows Insiders (Fast) and will roll out to all Windows 10 users soon. The app itself is free and it can be used with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, or Office Online—the free web-based version of Office for consumers.

A few key reasons to use the app include:

• Quickly switch between apps. See all your Office apps in one place and switch between them with a single click.
• Get back into your work. Jump to your most recently used documents, pinned documents, and documents shared with you—whether they’re on your local machine or stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.
• Find what you need. With Microsoft Search integrated prominently, you can quickly find the apps, documents, people, and sites you need to get your work done.
• Tailor it to your organization. Organizations can apply company branding and integrate other line of business applications through single sign-on to customize the experience for their users.

The Office app will replace the My Office app, which currently helps users manage their Office 365 subscriptions. If you already have the My Office app, you will get the new Office app through an automatic update in the coming months. Otherwise, you can download it from the Microsoft Store. Starting this summer, new Windows 10 devices will come with the Office app already installed—making it easier than ever to start using Office on a new PC.

Let us know what you think

We are excited to share this initial release with the Windows Insiders, and we’ll continue to improve the experience based on your feedback. Please let us know what you think via the feedback link under Settings within the app.

The post Introducing the Office app for Windows 10 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

The gig economy, which includes freelancers, consultants, contractors, and solopreneurs, is on the rise. According to Staffing Industry Analysts, the total spent on gig work in 2015 was $792 billion. Experts believe that within 10 years a larger proportion of the U.S. workforce will participate in the gig economy. In addition, according to Field Nation, 86 percent of independent workers intentionally choose freelancing.

The implications for enterprise companies are profound. To thrive in a highly competitive environment with rapidly changing technology and customer needs, enterprises must be agile and adapt to new business models to get work done with external talent. While adding on-demand freelance talent to the mix offers measurable results in speed and efficiency, the path to transforming existing policies and processes is largely undefined.

Our launch partner for this toolkit is Upwork, one of the largest online global marketplaces with over 375,000 freelancers in over 180 countries. We specifically are partnering with Upwork Enterprise, their end-to-end compliance and freelance talent sourcing solution.

The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit offers solutions for the main friction points enterprises encounter when deploying a freelance program, including: internal communications and awareness, team-wide collaboration, data analytics, and workflow automation.

Internal communications and awareness

One of the major challenges of launching an enterprise freelance program is driving awareness and education among internal stakeholders and adopters. Employees need a place where they can get started to learn how the program works, access required training, and review best practices for engaging with freelancers.

Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit solves for this with the SharePoint communication site template—a “one-stop shop” for program details to help accelerate freelance adoption and onboarding, including:

• Repository for relevant documentation and presentations about the program.
• Use cases to show employees the kinds of projects they can get done with freelancers.
• FAQs seeded with the top questions from enterprise employees.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the SharePoint expert talent pool.

See our SharePoint communication site infographic to learn more.

Team-wide collaboration

The nature of enterprise freelance projects requires team members to collaborate on multiple files, manage varied tasks, and communicate across time zones. To keep cross-functional, multi-geographical teams moving in the same direction, the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit provides guidance around using Microsoft Teams as a powerful hub for teamwork that brings chats, meetings, calls, files, and apps into one shared workspace.

With Teams, enterprises can manage their freelance communication and collaboration needs, specifically through:

• Communication—Public and private teams for members to engage in discussion.
• Task management—One place to track progress and align each team member’s workflow via integration with project management tools like Microsoft Planner.
• File storage—One place to store shared files and retrieve them through intelligent search.
• External guest access—The ability for external users worldwide to collaborate in all aspects of freelance projects through the free version of Teams.
• Security—External guest access to project-specific teams keeps your information safe without giving wholesale access.

See our Teams infographic to learn more.

Data analytics

A major challenge in scaling an enterprise freelance program is capturing, tracking, and communicating performance KPIs. The Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit leverages Microsoft Power BI, a business analytics service that deliver insights by collecting real-time data from multiple sources, simplifying data prep, and producing customized, easy-to-understand reports and dashboards.

Power BI helps enterprise program managers to:

• Make data-driven decisions.
• Compare freelance program results to conventional staffing solutions.
• Identify the teams within your organization currently leveraging freelance talent by discipline type to help identify future opportunities within your company.

To enhance the core functionality of Power BI for a freelance environment, the freelance toolkit offers:

• A Power BI template with sample visualizations.
• A Power BI connector to pull data from disparate sources into dashboards.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the Power BI talent pool.

See our Power BI infographic to learn more.

Workflow automation

An enterprise freelance program requires provisioning, compliance, and monitoring, all while providing a frictionless process for your employees. To reduce the need for manual completion of repetitive tasks, Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit uses Microsoft Flow to create automated workflows between apps and services that send notifications, synchronize files, and collect data.

For example, Microsoft Flow can help business decision makers automate the following scenarios:

• Employee training and compliance. By visiting the freelance program SharePoint communication site, employees can sign up for the pilot by completing a compliance training video supported by Microsoft Stream.
• Internal community signup. After an employee completes the compliance training video, the employee is automatically added to an internal Teams channel where employees can collaborate with others who are part of the program and share experiences.
• Upwork account creation. After the employee is added to the Teams channel, their account information, which includes their name and email address, is sent to Upwork for account creation on their platform, so they can start posting jobs on the platform.

In addition to core Microsoft Flow functionality, the freelance toolkit offers:

• Case studies to show how you can use Microsoft Flow within an enterprise freelance program.
• An engagement template to help you connect with freelancers in the Microsoft Flow talent pool.

See our Microsoft Flow infographic to learn more.

Our journey and what we learned

Like many of our customers, Microsoft is also in the process of navigating how to responsibly weave freelance engagements into our enterprise environment. Over the past year, we completed over 2,000 freelance projects across writing, research, video editing, translation, design, and data science—spanning 25 internal teams and hundreds of employees.

But getting to this point was not easy—we had to internally transform ourselves, and we needed to build an infrastructure that could support the complexities of an enterprise freelance program. This led us to develop the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit, which combines our leading enterprise productivity apps with curated tools, templates, and best practices to address the specific needs of enterprise freelance programs. The work has paid off. To date, we’ve seen measurable cost and time savings.

Get started

Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit is available for no additional cost as part of an Office 365 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription. Learn more about Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit and a Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription.

Please note: Each enterprise will need to evaluate and determine its own needs—including such things as data handling and compliance requirements—and should use their existing Microsoft 365 investments they determine appropriate.

Learn more about the freelance toolkit journey with Upwork.

The post Introducing Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit—a solution to launch and scale your freelance workforce appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Howdy folks,

I’m so excited to share today’s news! We just turned on the ability to securely sign in with your Microsoft account using a standards-based FIDO2 compatible device—no username or password required! FIDO2 enables users to leverage standards-based devices to easily authenticate to online services—in both mobile and desktop environments. This is available now in United States and will roll out globally over the next few weeks.

This combination of ease of use, security, and broad industry support is going to be transformational both at home and in the modern workplace. Every month, more than 800 million people use a Microsoft account to create, connect, and share from anywhere to Outlook, Office, OneDrive, Bing, Skype, and Xbox Live for work and play. And now they can all benefit from this simple user experience and greatly improved security.

Starting today, you can use a FIDO2 device or Windows Hello to sign in to your Microsoft account using the Microsoft Edge browser.

Watch this quick video showing how it works:

Microsoft has been on a mission to eliminate passwords and help people protect their data and accounts from threats. As a member of the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), we’ve been working with others to develop open standards for the next generation of authentication. I’m happy to share that Microsoft is the first Fortune 500 company to support password-less authentication using the the WebAuthn and FIDO2 specifications, and Microsoft Edge supports the widest array of authenticators compared to other major browsers.

If you want to know more details on how it works and how to get started, keep reading on.

Get started

To sign in with your Microsoft Account using a FIDO2 security key:

1. If you haven’t already, make sure you update to Windows 10 October 2018.
2. Go to the Microsoft account page on Microsoft Edge and sign in as you normally would.
3. Select Security > More security options and under Windows Hello and security keys, you’ll see instructions for setting up a security key. (You can purchase a security key from one of our partners, including Yubico and Feitian Technologies that support the FIDO2 standard.*)
4. Next time you sign in, you can either click More Options > Use a security key or type in your username. At that point, you’ll be asked to use a security key to sign in.

And as a reminder, here’s how to sign in with your Microsoft account using Windows Hello:

1. Make sure you’ve updated to Windows 10 October 2018.
2. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to set up Windows Hello. If you have Windows Hello set up, you’re good to go!
3. Next time you sign in on Microsoft Edge, you can either click More Options > Use Windows Hello or a security key or type in your username. At that point, you’ll be asked to use Windows Hello or a security to sign in.

If you need more help, check out our detailed help article about how to get set up.

*There are a couple of optional features in the FIDO2 spec that we believe are fundamental to security, so only keys that have implemented those features will work. Read What is a Microsoft-compatible security key? to learn more.

How does it work?

Under the covers, we implemented the WebAuthn and FIDO2 CTAP2 specifications into our services to make this a reality.

Unlike passwords, FIDO2 protects user credentials using public/private key encryption. When you create and register a FIDO2 credential, the device (your PC or the FIDO2 device) generates a private and public key on the device. The private key is stored securely on the device and can only be used after it has been unlocked using a local gesture like biometric or PIN. Note that your biometric or PIN never leaves the device. At the same time that the private key is stored, the public key is sent to the Microsoft account system in the cloud and registered with your user account.

When you later sign in, the Microsoft account system provides a nonce to your PC or FIDO2 device. Your PC or device then uses the private key to sign the nonce. The signed nonce and metadata is sent back to the Microsoft account system, where it is verified using the public key. The signed metadata as specified by the WebAuthn and FIDO2 specs provides information, such as whether the user was present, and verifies the authentication through the local gesture. It’s these properties that make authentication with Windows Hello and FIDO2 devices not “phishable” or easily stolen by malware.

How do Windows Hello and FIDO2 devices implement this? Based on the capabilities of your Windows 10 device, you will either have a built-in secure enclave, known as a hardware trusted platform module (TPM) or a software TPM. The TPM stores the private key, which requires either your face, fingerprint, or PIN to unlock it. Similarly, a FIDO2 device, like a security key, is a small external device with its own built-in secure enclave that stores the private key and requires the biometric or PIN to unlock it. Both options offer two-factor authentication in one step, requiring both a registered device and a biometric or PIN to successfully sign in.

Check out this article on our Identity Standards blog, which goes into all the technical details around the implementation.

What’s next

We have tons of great things coming out as part of our efforts to reduce and even eliminate the use of passwords. We are currently building the same sign-in experience from a browser with security keys for work and school accounts in Azure Active Directory. Enterprise customers will be able to preview this early next year, where they will be able to allow their employees to set up their own security keys for their account to sign in to Windows 10 and the cloud.

Furthermore, as more browsers and platforms start supporting the WebAuthn and FIDO2 standards, the password-less experience—available on Microsoft Edge and Windows today—will be hopefully available everywhere!

Stay tuned for more details early next year!

Best Regards,
Alex Simons (@Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)
CVP of Program Management
Microsoft Identity Division

The post Secure password-less sign-in for your Microsoft account using a security key or Windows Hello appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Microsoft Word has long been the standard for creating professional-quality documents. Technologies like Editor—Word’s AI-powered writing assistant—make it an indispensable tool for the written word. But at some point in the writing process, you’ll need some information you don’t have at your fingertips, even with the best tools. When this happens, you likely do what research tells us many Word users do: leave a placeholder in your document and come back to it later to stay in your flow.

Today, we’re starting to roll out new capabilities to Word that help users create and fill in these placeholders without leaving the flow of their work. For example, type TODO: finish this section or <<insert closing here>> and Word recognizes and tracks them as to-dos. When you come back to the document, you’ll see a list of your remaining to-dos, and you can click each one to navigate back to the right spot.

Once you’ve created your to-dos, Word can also help you complete them. If you need help from a friend or coworker, just @mention them within a placeholder. Word sends them a notification with a “deep link” to the relevant place in the document. Soon, they’ll be able to reply to the notification with their contributions, and those contributions will be inserted directly into the document—making it easy to complete the task with an email from any device.

Over time, Office will use AI to help fill in many of these placeholders. In the next few months, Word will use Microsoft Search to suggest content for a to-do like <<insert chart of quarterly sales figures>>. You will be able to pick from the results and insert content from another document with a single click.

These capabilities are available today for Word on the Mac for Office Insiders (Fast) as a preview. We’ll roll these features out to all Office 365 subscribers soon for Word for Windows, the Mac, and the web.

Get started as an Office for Mac Insider

Office Insider for Mac has two speeds: Insider Fast and Insider Slow. To get access to this and other new feature releases, you’ll need a subscription to Office 365. To select a speed, open Microsoft Auto Update and on the Help menu select Check for Updates.

As always, we would love to hear from you, please send us your thoughts at UserVoice or visit us on Twitter or Facebook. You can also let us know how you like the new features by clicking the smiley face icon in the upper-right corner of Word.

The post Collaborate with others and keep track of to-dos with new AI features in Word appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Office 365 ProPlus, the cloud-connected version of Office, delivers the most productive and most secure Office experience—with the lowest total cost of ownership for deployment and management. However, for customers who aren’t ready for the cloud, Office 2019 provides new features and updates to the on-premises apps for both users and IT professionals. Like Windows Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, Office 2019 provides a set of valuable enhancements for customers who can’t be cloud-connected or receive regular updates.

The new enhancements in Office 2019 are a subset of a long list of features that have been added to Office 365 ProPlus over the last three years. Office 2019 is a one-time release and won’t receive future feature updates. However, we’ll continue to add new features to Office 365 ProPlus monthly, including innovations in collaboration, artificial intelligence (AI), security, and more.

Office 2019 delivers features across apps to help users create amazing content in less time. In PowerPoint 2019, you can create cinematic presentations with new features like Morph and Zoom. And improved inking features across the apps in Windows—like the roaming pencil case, pressure sensitivity, and tilt effects—allow you to naturally create documents.

Excel 2019 adds powerful new data analysis features, including new formulas and charts and enhancements to PowerPivot.

Word 2019 and Outlook 2019 help you focus on what matters most. Learning Tools, like Read Aloud and Text Spacing, make it easier to engage with your content. Focus Mode blocks out distractions and puts your content front and center. And Focused Inbox moves less important emails out of the way—so you can get straight to taking care of business. For a longer list of the new features in Office 2019, see our FAQs.

Office 2019 also includes new IT value for enhanced security and streamlined administration. We introduced Click-to-Run (C2R), a modern deployment technology, in Office 2013, and it’s now used to deploy and update Office across hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. With Office 2019, we’re moving the on-premises versions of Office to C2R to reduce costs and improve security. The advantages of C2R include predictable monthly security updates, up-to-date apps on installation, reduced network consumption through Windows 10 download optimization technology, and an easy upgrade path to Office 365 ProPlus. C2R offers the same enterprise-focused management capabilities as Microsoft Installer (MSI) based products and will also support an in-place upgrade when you move to Office 2019 from older MSI-based products. To learn more, refer to the Office 2019 Click-to-Run FAQ.

The 2019 release of Office products also includes updates to our servers, and in the coming weeks, we will release Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.

Office 2019 is a valuable update for customers who aren’t yet ready for the cloud. And each time we release a new on-premises version of Office, customers ask us if this will be our last. We’re pleased to confirm that we’re committed to another on-premises release in the future. While the cloud offers real benefits in productivity, security, and total cost of ownership, we recognize that each customer is at a different point in their adoption of cloud services. We see the on-premises version of Office as an important part of our commitment to give customers the flexibility they need to move to the cloud at their own pace.

Availability

• Commercial volume-licensed (trusted) customers can access Office 2019 starting today.
• Office 2019 is now available for consumer and commercial customers. For consumer customers in China, India, and Japan, Office 2019 suites will be available in the next few months.
• Certain features are only available in the Mac or Windows versions of Office 2019. For details, see the FAQ.

The post Office 2019 is now available for Windows and Mac appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we’re pleased to announce four new artificial intelligence (AI) features that make Excel even more powerful:

• Ideas
• New data types
• Insert Data from Picture
• Dynamic arrays

Introducing intelligent suggestions with Ideas

Ideas is an AI-powered insights service that helps people take advantage of the full power of Office. Proactively surfacing suggestions that are tailored to the task at hand, Ideas helps users create professional documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in less time. In Excel, for instance, Ideas helps identify trends, patterns, and outliers in a data set—helping customers analyze and understand their data in seconds. Ideas is generally available in Excel today and will begin rolling out in preview to other apps starting with PowerPoint Online. Simply click the lightning bolt icon in Excel or PowerPoint Online and Ideas will start making recommendations. Read more about Ideas in this support article.

Making new data types generally available today

Excel has always been great at helping people make the most of numbers. But now Excel can do even more: It can recognize real-world concepts, starting with Stocks and Geography. This new AI-powered capability turns a single, flat piece of text into an interactive entity containing layers of rich information. For instance, by converting a list of countries in a workbook to “Geography” entities, customers can weave location data into an analysis of their own data. And this new capability—though deceptively simple—opens a whole new world of possibilities. As we add new data types over time, Excel’s rows, columns, cells, logic engine, and tools can be used to organize, analyze, and reason over any combination of numbers and sophisticated entities. The Stocks and Geography data types are generally available today. Read more about data types in this support article.

Saying goodbye to manual data entry

With Insert Data from Picture, you can take a picture of a hand-drawn or printed data table with your Android device and convert that analog information into an Excel spreadsheet with a single click. New image recognition functionality automatically converts the picture to a fully editable table in Excel, eliminating the need for you to manually enter data. Insert Data from Picture will be available in preview for the Excel Android app soon.

Calculating with ease using dynamic arrays

With dynamic arrays, we continue to invest in making advanced formulas easier to use. Using dynamic arrays, any formula that returns an array of values will seamlessly “spill” into neighboring unoccupied cells, making it as easy to get an array of values returned as it is to work on a single cell. You can immediately harness the power of dynamic arrays by using one the new FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, SORTBY, SEQUENCE, SINGLE, and RANDARRAY functions to build spreadsheets that would previously have been nearly impossible. So now, rather than writing many complex formulas to solve a multi-cell problem, you can write one simple formula and get an array of values returned.

Faster LOOKUP and MATCH

We’re not only adding new capabilities to Excel, we’re also continually improving the features customers already know and love. For example, we have invested in significant performance improvements for important lookup functions. We’re pleased to announce that VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and MATCH functions operating on large data sets will now execute in seconds instead of minutes. We’ve also improved performance on many key operations like copy/paste, undo, conditional formatting, cell editing, cell selection, filtering, file open, and programmability.

We’re excited about these new features and hope you are, too. For us, Excel isn’t just a tool—it’s a way of life! And today’s announcements not only deliver incremental improvements in data handling and performance, they also push the app into new territory with new data types and AI-powered analysis services. We look forward to showing you more at Ignite this week and can’t wait to see what you do with it all. As always, we’d love to hear from you, so please send us your thoughts through UserVoice—and keep the conversation going by following Excel on Facebook and Twitter.

Availability

• Ideas will be available starting today.
• New data types are rolling out to users of Excel in Office 365, in the English language only starting today.
• Performance improvements are rolling out first to Excel in Office 365 starting today.
• Dynamic arrays is available in preview for users signed up for the Office 365 Insiders Program starting today.
• The Insert Data from Picture feature will be available in preview for users signed up for the Office 365 Insiders Program on the Android Excel app soon.

The post Bringing AI to Excel—4 new features announced today at Ignite appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We heard our customers loud and clear—they want support for the Microsoft Authenticator app on Apple Watch. So, that’s why I’m thrilled to announce we are starting to roll out the public preview of the Microsoft Authenticator companion app for Apple Watch and plan to release to general availability within the next few weeks. This experience will allow you to approve sign-in notifications that require PIN or biometric on your Watch without having to use your phone.

The Microsoft Authenticator app on Apple Watch supports Microsoft personal, work, and school accounts that are set up with push notifications. All supported accounts automatically sync to the Watch.

Try it out

To test drive the app, upgrade to Microsoft Authenticator v. 6.0.0+ on your phone when it becomes available to you. If you want to try it out before it’s generally available, sign up to become a Microsoft Authenticator TestFlight user.

Once you have the upgrade installed, just follow these three steps:

1. Make sure your phone and Watch are paired.
2. Open the Microsoft Authenticator app on your Watch.

3. Under the account title, tap the Set up button. If there’s no Set up button next to your account, no action is required! You can now approve sign-in notifications on your Watch.

To see the full experience in action, sign in to your account using the Microsoft Authenticator. When a notification comes to your Watch, you can easily and quickly approve.

From a security standpoint, we still consider the experience on the Watch as two-step verification. The first factor is your possession of the Watch. The second factor is the PIN that only you know. When you put the Watch on your wrist in the morning, you will need to unlock it. As long as you don’t remove the Watch from your wrist and it stays within range of your phone, it will stay unlocked—so you don’t need to provide your PIN again.

If you have additional questions, please see our Microsoft Authenticator app FAQ page. Also, feel free to comment below—we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Microsoft Authenticator companion app for Apple Watch now in public preview appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Office is used by more than a billion people every month, so while we’re excited about these changes, we also recognize how important it is to get things right. To guide our work, we came up with “The Three Cs”—a set of guiding principles that we use as a north star. Because these principles will make this process feel different than any previous user experience update, we thought it would be useful to share them with you.

Customers—We’re using a customer-driven innovation process to co-create the design of the Office apps. That process consists of three phases: initial customer research and analysis; concepting and co-creation; and validation and refinement.

Context—Customers love the power of Office, but they don’t need every feature at the same time. We want our new designs to understand the context that you’re working in, so you can focus on the job at hand. That means surfacing the most relevant commands based on the work you’re doing and making it easy to connect and collaborate with others.

Control—We recognize that established skills and routines are powerful—and that the way someone uses the apps often depends on specific parts of the user interface. So we want to give users control, allowing them to toggle significant changes on and off.

These updates are exclusive to Office.com and Office 365—the always up-to-date versions of our apps and services. But they won’t happen all at once. Instead, over the next several months we will deploy new designs to select customers in stages and carefully test and learn. We’ll move them into production only after they’ve made it through rigorous rounds of validation and refinement.

The initial set of updates includes three changes:

Simplified ribbon—A new, updated version of the ribbon is designed to help users focus on their work and collaborate naturally with others. People who prefer to dedicate more screen space to the commands will still be able to expand the ribbon to the classic three-line view.

The first app to get this new experience will be the web version of Word and will start to roll out to select consumer users today on Office.com. Select Insiders will then see the simplified ribbon in Outlook for Windows in July.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows offer our deepest, richest feature set—and they’re the preferred experience for users who want to get the most from our apps. Users have a lot of “muscle memory” built around these versions, so we plan on being especially careful with changes that could disrupt their work. We aren’t ready to bring the simplified ribbon to these versions yet because we feel like we need more feedback from a broader set of users first. But when we do, users will always be able to revert back to the classic ribbon with one click.

New colors and icons—Across the apps you’ll start to see new colors and new icons built as scalable graphics—so they render with crisp, clean lines on screens of any size. These changes are designed to both modernize the user experience and make it more inclusive and accessible.

The new colors and icons will first appear in the web version of Word for Office.com. Then, later this month, select Insiders will see them in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows. In July, they will go to Outlook for Windows, and in August they will begin rolling out to Outlook for Mac.

Search—Search will become a much more important element of the user experience, providing access to commands, content, and people. With “zero query search,” simply placing your cursor in the search box will bring up recommendations powered by AI and the Microsoft Graph.

Commercial users can already see this experience in action in Office.com, SharePoint Online, and the Outlook mobile app, and it will start rolling out to commercial users of Outlook on the web in August.

For an overview of these changes, check out the video below by Jon Friedman, our chief designer for Office.

Video source.

To develop these initial designs, Jon’s team worked closely with customers. They collected data on how people use the apps and built prototypes to test new concepts. While we have plenty of work left to do, we’ve definitely heard encouraging things from customers using early builds:

“It’s simpler and I feel like I can open it and immediately get my bearings and move forward. Not a lot of extra information. The tasks are obvious on this screen.”

“The toolbar provides the most frequently used features…maximizing the screen real estate for the actual content.”

“I like the extra space. What I do find is that the feature to toggle it off/on is helpful because occasionally I can’t figure out (quickly) where something went.”

We plan on carefully monitoring usage and feedback as the changes roll out, and we’ll update our designs as we learn more.

Technology is changing the way people get things done at work, at school, and at home, resetting expectations for productivity. Inspired by these changes, these updates are designed to deliver a balance of power and simplicity. But what’s most exciting for us is that over the next few months we’ll be co-creating and refining these new experiences with our customers—and making the power of Office more accessible for everyone.

The post Power and simplicity—updates to the Office 365 user experience appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the rollout of recently redesigned and improved parental consent capabilities to our Microsoft account users in the European Union. This is an important step in giving our users the capabilities that are defined in the General Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR).

At Microsoft, we firmly believe that children are an important part of our user ecosystem, whether they’re playing Minecraft, chatting with their grandparents on Skype, or watching Peppa Pig on a Surface Book. We also believe it’s important that parents and guardians have suitable safeguards available. That’s why Microsoft has a long standing commitment to COPPA and similar regulations across the globe.

GDPR requires parents to provide their consent to process the personal data of children younger than 16 years old. EU member states may choose to set a lower age – which some have done – provided it isn’t lower than age 13. The U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and GDPR have a lot of overlap, so we have worked to combine and meet the stricter standards across the board.

To meet this requirement, our systems need to know which Microsoft account users are adults and which are not, using a method which is acceptable under the various legislative requirements.

We will do this by assuring we have a date of birth for all covered accounts. For anyone who has not provided this information, we are now starting to prompt them to provide their country and date of birth. Then, users who are younger than the age of consent for their country are prompted for parental consent when they sign into their account. (Note that they are given a short grace period to allow parents time to complete the verification process.)

To provide consent to their child’s account, parents can prove they are an adult by using a credit card. We also offer alternative age verification methods for parents who don’t have, or don’t want to use their credit card. Parents can contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support to verify age and identity based on appropriate government documents. After the grace period, access to the child’s account will be blocked until the parent completes the consent and verification process.

We realize that completing parental consent may be time consuming. As with many of our counterparts across the industry, we rely on the use of a credit card charge to verify that the user is an adult. The use of a credit card is one of regulatory approved mechanisms for proving adulthood. We have a long-standing commitment to work in the standards industry identity solutions that allow a parent to verify their identity in a secure, private and consistent way across the globe.

We have been closely monitoring the rollout and have been diligently investigating issues as they are raised. One of the trends we have seen is around adults who are being asked to provide parental consent. In all cases we have been able to track this back to the user, who are intentionally or mistakenly, entering a date of birth that classifies them as a minor. We are adding several mechanisms to help in this situation but unfortunately it does force us to verify the user is not a child. We will continue to study ways of improving this experience. Of course, our goal is to enable all users to give us their correct date of birth with as little friction as possible.

I hope you’ll take some time to check this new feature out as we continue to refine and improve our scenarios that support parents keeping their children safe online.

As always, we would love to receive any feedback or suggestions you have.

Best Regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

The post Introducing Microsoft account age-related features for GDPR appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here’s a look at what’s new and coming soon:

New in Outlook Calendar

Bill pay reminders—We are adding bill payments to the events we automatically help you track. Just like travel reservations and package delivery information presented in Outlook with a summary card at the top of your email today, we added support for bill payments. Outlook will identify bills you receive in email, show you a summary at the top, and automatically add a calendar event on the due date. You will also receive an email reminder two days before the due date so you can always pay your bills on time. Available for Outlook.com. Learn what other events and providers we support.

Suggested event locations and meeting rooms—Adding a meeting or event location just got easier and faster in Outlook. Even before you start typing, Outlook offers suggestions for your meeting location, including recently used (and available) conference rooms and other common locations such as “my office.” Once you start to type in the location field, Outlook suggests options based on Bing and then autocompletes your meeting location with the necessary information. For public locations, the rich location feature in Outlook adds the full address to your Outlook calendar event. Outlook for iOS will then use your current location, your destination address, and traffic updates to send you a notification to let you know when it is time to leave for your next event, to make sure you get there on time. Coming soon in Outlook for Windows.

We also added this location and context aware approach to further personalize the suggested locations when creating a calendar event on your mobile device. Suggestions are based on machine learning models that take into consideration your location, the list of attendees, the proposed meeting time of day, and other elements of your meeting. If you need a conference room, Outlook shows your organization’s room availability, so you can pick the best option for your meeting with just a tap. Reserving a meeting room from your mobile device will continue to get easier and faster as it learns your preferences. Available in Outlook for iOS.

Meeting RSVP tracking and forwarding—Keeping track of events you’ve organized or plan to attend is key to time management. But managing who is attending can be even more effective for everyone. Outlook now allows you to see the tracked responses and RSVPs for your meetings—even the ones you didn’t organize. With this insight, invited attendees can better manage their time and decide if they should attend based on the plans of others. For example, knowing who’s going can save you some time if you decide the meeting can be addressed by other teammates who are planning to attend.

Additionally, if you are planning a meeting that requires a tight control of the attendee list, Outlook gives you the option to allow or prevent the forwarding of your calendar invitation. Under Response Options, select New Meeting and then check or uncheck Allow Forwarding. Coming soon in Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.

Outlook has also adjusted the tracking of RSVPs for meetings with large attendee lists or big meetings. If you use a distribution list to reach over 500 recipients, Outlook now tracks the responses for everyone individually. Now you can update the details for big meetings at any time if changes are required, outside the Office 365 email and calendar recipient maximum of 500. Available across Outlook.

Multiple time zones—Outlook reduces the complexity of managing events across times zones. You can now define the start and end times of appointments and meetings across different time zones. Set up a travel event with your departure in one time zone and arrival time in the local time zone of your destination. Plus, on the main calendar grid, you can now show multiple time zones in Outlook. In Windows, you can add up to three time zones under File > Options > Calendar Time Zones. In Mac, add one additional time zone under Outlook > Preferences > Calendar Time Zones. For Outlook on the web, click the Time Zone drop-down arrow in your Calendar meeting invite to add an additional time zone. Now, at a glance, you can simply understand what’s happening and when around the globe with Outlook.

New in Outlook Mail

Show organization directory details—In case you missed it, Outlook now adds the details of your organization directory to your Outlook contact information. We recently announced this new feature under Show Organization, so you can quickly learn who’s who in your company. If your company data is connected to Azure Active Directory, you can see who your contact reports to, their chain of command in your company, and even other colleagues they work with most. Knowing more about who might help you take care of business is right there in Outlook. You can simply tap search in your Outlook mobile app once to quickly identify your key contact, open their contact card, and view their organizational information. Available in Outlook for iOS.

Proxy support—Some organizations have adopted the use of proxies to block direct access to the internet from mobile devices. Now Outlook supports companies that use SOCKS proxies for added protection between their company data and the internet. Available in Outlook for iOS and Android.

Bcc warning—On occasion, you may be blind copied on an email message and you’d like to respond. Just in case you didn’t notice the subtle addressing, Outlook protects you if you reply to that message by alerting you that you were blind copied—you might choose not to reply to everyone on the recipient list but only reply to the sender, with all due respect. Available in Outlook for Windows.

Coming soon to Outlook for iOS and Android

Sync draft folders—We’re adding the ability to draft a message in Outlook on one device and finish it on another. Start a message on your mobile device and finish it when you’re back at your desk—or the other way around! Outlook helps you get things done when the time is right for you. Coming to Outlook for iOS May 2018. Available in Outlook for Windows, Mac, and Android.

Office Lens technology in Outlook for Android—When you need to capture and share details in the form of an image, such as a whiteboard, photo, or document, we’ve added a new photo icon to Outlook integrated with Office Lens technology. Simply start a new message in Outlook and touch the new photo icon to capture a whiteboard, document, or photo and get a trimmed and enhanced image instantly embedded in your email message. Outlook integrates the apps and services you need to be productive, so you can quickly and easily share what you need, when you need it, with fewer taps and apps! Coming to Outlook for Android May 2018.

Quick reply—We’re making it easier to respond quickly and more meaningfully in Outlook. By keeping your message content in view, and a new reply box at the bottom of your screen, Outlook helps you keep the conversation going with a modern, chat-like experience. Coming to Outlook for Android May 2018 and later this summer to Outlook for Mac. Available in Outlook for iOS.

Favorite people—We recently announced the ability to identify groups and email folders in Outlook, and soon we will add the ability to tag your favorite people. Keeping your key contacts front and center in your mobile search experience, as well as on top of your message folders, helps you quickly identify the right people to help you get more done. You will also be able to identify favorite people from Outlook on your mobile device, just as you can today from the web, and these favorite people tags will remain consistent, so you can find them on the web or on the go. Coming to Outlook for iOS and Android June 2018.

Office 365 Groups for OneNote and meeting events in Outlook—Staying on top of what’s going on with your Office 365 Groups is made even easier with the ability to view your group events in Outlook, as well as access the group’s OneNote Notebook. You will be able to track events in the group’s contact card and simply launch OneNote from Outlook to access the notes your group compiled in its OneNote. Coming to Outlook for iOS June 2018.

Block external content—Images embedded in emails may contain content that alerts the sender that you’ve opened their email. Tracking which emails are opened can be important to digital marketers. But if you don’t want this to be tracked, Outlook now helps to protect you and your inbox and block this external content. Coming to Outlook for Android May 2018.

Single Office 365 account in Outlook—Respecting the data security and compliance policies of our largest and highly regulated customers is a key pillar to the Office 365 value. Some companies have a requirement to capture all communications information within their corporate environment. For company managed mobile devices, Outlook will help customers mitigate the risk of users copying information from their company’s Office 365 account to a personal account on a mobile device, or accidentally sending company information from personal accounts. Companies will soon be able to enforce corporate policies on their managed mobile devices to allow a single account in Outlook. Coming to Outlook for iOS and Android June 2018.

Please be sure to watch the Office 365 roadmap for more information about our plans to roll these features out across additional Outlook experiences. And send us your ideas and suggestions on our UserVoice channel—we read all your feedback.

The post New Calendar, Mail, and mobile Outlook features help you get things done appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

With an Office 365 Home or Office 365 Personal subscription, you already get best-in-class apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as well as powerful cloud services like OneDrive and Outlook.com. Office 365 lets you create, share, and communicate anywhere, on any device.

The new protection capabilities offer subscribers additional peace of mind with:

• File recovery from malicious attacks like ransomware.
• Tools to help keep your information secure and private.
• Advanced protection from viruses and cybercrime.

Recover files from malicious attacks like ransomware

Ransomware has become an increasingly pervasive attack method in which cybercriminals “lock up” and prevent access to files in an effort to extort money from their victims. To help protect customers we are introducing two new capabilities that allow you to recover your files if they are affected by a malicious attack like ransomware.

Files Restore—We’re bringing our powerful Files Restore feature from OneDrive for Business to your personal OneDrive account, so it doesn’t matter if they’re work or personal files—they’re protected in OneDrive. Files Restore allows you to restore your entire OneDrive to a previous point in time within the last 30 days. You can use this feature to recover from an accidental mass delete, file corruption, ransomware, or another catastrophic event.

With Files Restore, you can recover from an accidental mass delete, file corruption, ransomware, or another catastrophic event.

Ransomware detection & recovery—Office 365 can now detect ransomware attacks and help you restore your OneDrive to a point before files were compromised, so you don’t have to submit to cybercriminal demands. We know this is important to our customers and a top request on UserVoice. If an attack is detected, you will be alerted through an email, mobile, or desktop notification and guided through a recovery process where you’ll find the date and time of attack preselected in Files Restore, making the process simple and easy to use. As these threats evolve, we are continuously improving detection capabilities to help keep you safe from the most advanced ransomware.

Notification of ransomware detected on your mobile phone, so you can immediately take action and restore your files.

Tools to help keep your information secure and private

Sending confidential or personal information online, like tax documents, family budgets, or a new business proposal, can be worrisome. Whether you’re sending an email or sharing a link, you want your information to reach only the intended recipients. Office 365 is adding three new capabilities to help keep your data secure and private in these cases.

Password protected sharing links—We’re adding an additional security option for links you share in OneDrive. You will now be able to set and require a password to access a shared file or folder. This prevents others from accessing your files if your intended recipient accidentally forwards or shares the link.

Set a password to access shared files or folders for an additional layer of protection.

Email encryption—Email encryption in Outlook.com offers an added layer of protection and ensures end-to-end encryption of your email. Unlike Outlook.com, some email providers don’t encrypt their connection, making it easy for hackers to intercept and read your communication. When you use Outlook.com email encryption, your email remains encrypted over a secure connection—minimizing the threat of your information being intercepted or leaked to cybercriminals.

Encryption is particularly useful in cases where it is unclear what level of security your intended recipients’ email providers offer. Recipients receive a link to a trusted Office 365 webpage where they can choose to receive a one-time passcode or re-authenticate with a trusted provider before viewing the email. Outlook.com email recipients who view the encrypted email in Outlook.com, the Outlook for iOS and Android app, or the Windows Mail app can read and reply just like they can with any other email—no extra steps needed. When composing an email in Outlook.com, sensitive information like social security numbers can be detected to provide you with a suggestion to send with encryption.

Prevent forwarding—You can now restrict your email recipients from forwarding or copying emails you send from Outlook.com. Additionally, Microsoft Office documents you attach to these emails are encrypted even after downloading, so if the recipient shares or forwards your attachment, the recipient of the forwarded email will not be able to open the attachment. Emails sent with the prevent forwarding option are also encrypted.

Select Encrypt and Prevent Forwarding so recipients can’t forward or copy the email.

Advanced protection from viruses and cybercrime

In October, we announced advanced link checking and attachment scanning in Outlook.com to protect you from previously unseen viruses and phishing scams in real-time. As cybercriminals resort to tricking people into giving away their sign-in credentials or downloading viruses through malicious emails and links, these advanced protections help keep Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers safe with enterprise-grade security.

Advanced link checking in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—We know it’s also important to provide this advanced protection in other places you encounter links. Starting later this year, links you click in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will also be checked in real-time to determine if the destination website is likely to download malware onto your computer or if it’s related to a phishing scam. If the link is suspicious, you will be redirected to a warning screen recommending you don’t access the site.

If you click an unsafe link, you’ll see a warning screen recommending not to continue.

Additional security protecting your account

Today’s announcements have focused on new, advanced protection capabilities for our Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers. However, those who use our free services also have strong protections in place. This includes robust Microsoft account security like two-factor authentication and anomalous sign-in detection. In addition, all Outlook.com attachments and links in emails are scanned for known viruses and phishing threats. OneDrive scans files on download for known threats, provides file versioning for all file types, and sends notifications if a mass file deletion is detected. We also implement industry standards with encryption at rest and in transit. These core capabilities align with the Microsoft promise to offer a high degree of security and protection for all our users.

Availability and feedback

We’re excited to provide these new advanced protection capabilities to our subscribers. Ransomware detection & recovery and Files Restore start rolling out today and will be available to all Office 365 subscribers soon. Password protected sharing links, email encryption, and prevent forwarding will start rolling out in the coming weeks. Advanced link checking and advanced attachment scanning is already available in Outlook.com, and advanced link checking in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will be coming the second half of 2018. Visit our support page to learn more about all the advanced protection features included in Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscriptions.

Let us know what you think of our new features. Share your thoughts and ideas in the OneDrive UserVoice, Outlook UserVoice, Word UserVoice, Excel UserVoice, and PowerPoint UserVoice.

The post Defend yourself from cybercrime with new Office 365 capabilities appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Let’s look at what you can expect to see in Outlook.com in the coming weeks:

• Mail—The fresh new look of the Mail experience will now be standard for all users—no need to toggle in! You’ll get a speedier performance, improved Skype integration, new ways to access your favorite add-ins—such as Boomerang, Evernote, and PayPal—and easier ways to categorize and filter your emails. We’re rolling out this Mail experience to all Outlook.com users over the next few weeks.
• Calendar—All Outlook.com users can now try out new beta experiences in the Calendar. This includes a more responsive interface, the ability to add an event in just a few clicks, and icons to help you identify your events faster.
• People—You can also try out beta experiences in the People section of Outlook.com, including a new look, quicker access to your favorite people, and easier ways to view, edit, and create contacts.

New look for Mail

All Outlook.com users now get the benefits of a faster email experience, a smarter inbox, and better personalization. In addition to features we announced when the beta began, we recently added better Skype integration, easier ways to categorize your emails, quicker access to settings, and more streamlined ways to access your favorite add-ins.

Updated Skype integration—With improved Skype integration, it’s easier than ever to chat in real-time right from your Outlook.com inbox and see all your contacts. Start an instant message or a free video call and participate in multiple chats at once. Just select the person you want to talk to and your conversation appears in its own chat window.

Chat and start a free video call right inside your inbox.

Improved category organization—Categories can be a great way to organize your mailbox in a way that suits your unique style. Now you can assign a name and color to each category and apply multiple categories to a single message, for those situations when emails belong in many buckets. Filtering messages by category is now easier than ever—just type the category name in the search bar or add a favorite category to the very top of your left sidebar and your most important messages will be one click away.

Assign multiple categories and colors to an email.

Personalized inbox—With Quick settings you can access the most popular ways to personalize your inbox in one click. You can change the theme of your inbox, the way conversations are displayed, and manage your Focused Inbox. Click the gear icon on the top right corner of your inbox to display Quick settings.

Quick settings give you one-click access to our more popular features.

Simplified add-in experience—With the new Mail experience, we’ve simplified the way you access add-ins, while giving you more control. Outlook add-ins bring your favorite apps right to your inbox, so you can accomplish tasks faster—including saving an email directly to your notebook, translating emails on the fly, paying your friends, or sending them a gift of coffee. With Outlook.com, you can access popular apps and services like Boomerang, Evernote, GIPHY, Gfycat, Microsoft Translator, MojiLaLa, PayPal, Trello, and more right from your inbox.

If you were using add-ins in the classic Outlook.com experience, they will show up pinned next to mail actions or in the drop-down menu once you open an email in the new experience. You can also install more add-ins from the Office Store—simply open an email, click the drop-down menu, and select Get Add-ins. Once installed, add-ins will show up in the drop-down menu. You can also choose to pin frequently used add-ins.

Find add-ins by clicking the drop-down menu inside an email.

Improved Calendar features

We are bringing an updated look to the beta experience of Calendar and new features that make it easier for you to manage and stay on top of your time. Let’s look at a few highlights.

Updated Calendar look and feel—The new look brings the best designs and learnings from the Mail experience to the Calendar. You’ll enjoy a modern design that reduces visual clutter and gives you faster ways to navigate your calendar. It’s also easier to find interesting calendars for your favorite activities—from TV shows to sports teams and events. We expanded our collection of event icons and updated the look and feel of existing ones—and we now automatically add relevant icons to your events, so you can easily see what is going on at a glance.

Toggle into the beta to see the new look for Calendar.

Simplified event creation—You can now quickly add events and details right from the Calendar without opening a new window. Simply click New event and add details to your event in a few clicks. Or click the calendar surface on the day you want to add an event and start typing to access the quick entry form. You can set up repeating events for all your routines to stay on top of your schedule.

Now you can easily see, create, and edit new events and details.

New People experience

Refreshed profile card—The new beta experience for People makes it easier to create, view, and edit your contacts and contact lists. We updated the look and feel of the People view to match the new profile cards, which are also being introduced across Microsoft products. Now, in every app where your contacts appear, you can hover over a person’s name or photo to see the new profile card.

The new profile card gives you quick access to your contacts’ information across Outlook.

Expanded contact information—Sometimes you want some extra information about your contacts, so we made it easier to add or edit birthdays and personal notes. To add a personal touch, you can now assign a photo to your contact using the new photo control.

Add a personal touch by uploading a photo of your contact.

Enriched People and Mail integration—It’s also now easier to send an email or start a chat directly from the People view. You can find recent conversations and attachments from a specific contact and see all the photos they have emailed you at a glance.

You can also mark contacts as favorites to let you more quickly access them from the Favorites folder. Contacts you add as favorites in People will also show up under favorites in Mail, and the other way around.

When you add a contact to your favorites in People, you can also see them in Mail.

Opt in to the beta

To try out these new experiences in Calendar and People, you can opt in to the beta by switching the Try the beta toggle on the top right of your inbox.

We hope you enjoy these new experiences we’ve brought to Outlook.com. There is more to come, and we need your help as we work to make Outlook.com better and better. Your feedback so far has been amazing, and we love reading and implementing it, so please keep writing to us in our UserVoice channel with your suggestions and ideas.

—The Outlook team

Frequently asked questions

Q. When will the new Mail experience show up?

A. The new Mail experience will become the standard experience for all Outlook.com users over the course of the next few weeks. If you want to try it out earlier, just slide the Try the beta toggle on the top right of your inbox.

Q. Why isn’t the toggle in the Mail experience switching me back to the classic experience?

A. As the new Mail experience becomes the default for all Outlook.com users, the toggle will no longer switch back to a classic experience. It will give users access to additional beta features we’ll try out in the Mail experience over time.

Q. How do I try the beta experience in Calendar and People?

A. The Outlook.com beta experience is controlled by a universal toggle that can be accessed from multiple pages. To access the beta experience for Calendar and People, just switch the Try the beta toggle in the top right of any screen in Outlook.com. You’ll see new beta features whenever you interact with Calendar and People. You can use the same toggle to go back to the classic experience.

Q. How do I pin add-ins in the new Mail experience?

A. To pin frequently used add-ins, click the gear icon > View full settings > Mail > Customize actions and then select the add-ins you want.

The post New Mail, Calendar, and People experiences coming to Outlook.com appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Teams for Intelligent Communications and Collaboration

Over the last year, Teams has evolved to become the ultimate hub for teamwork. Built on the strength and scale of Office 365 with over 120 million users, Teams delivers chat-based collaboration, meetings, calling, and soon, full enterprise voice features. All of this is underpinned by the Microsoft Graph, allowing for rich AI capabilities. As part of Office 365, Teams uniquely delivers these capabilities at scale, with enterprise-grade security and compliance standards to meet the needs of a global business.

To advance our vision for Intelligent Communications, we are announcing new Teams features coming later this year, including:

• Cloud recording—Will provide one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include facial recognition, so remarks can be attributed to specific meeting attendees.
• Inline message translation—People who speak different languages will be able to fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
• Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices—Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken, natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.
• Background blur on video—The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.
• Proximity detection for Teams Meetings—This feature will make it easy for you to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting.
• Mobile sharing in meetings—Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device.

These new capabilities build on the breadth of new features that have come to Teams in the last year, including guest access, new ways to interact with apps, and new meeting and calling capabilities.

Today, we are also announcing new enterprise-grade calling features in Teams, including consultative transfer and call delegation and federation. In addition, we’re introducing Direct Routing, which will enable customers to use their existing telephony infrastructure with Teams for calling. When you combine a Microsoft Calling Plan or Direct Routing with our Phone System for Office 365, Teams becomes a full voice service. These new capabilities are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2018.

Intelligent Communications for your devices

Hardware plays a critical part in delivering consistent, high-quality video and voice experiences. We are announcing that Teams is now enabled for a full spectrum of calling and meeting room devices, including:

• Microsoft collaboration devices—Microsoft Surface Hub is a powerful all-in-one large-screen team collaboration device. Microsoft Teams will be natively supported on Surface Hub, enhancing the capabilities of Teams in huddle spaces and meeting rooms equipped with Surface Hub.
• Meeting room systems—Lenovo and HP join existing partners Logitech, Crestron, and Polycom to transform the conference room experience with rich audio, HD video, center-of-room control, and one-touch join. All Skype Room Systems will support Teams meetings.
• Connections to existing equipment—Teams will certify new solutions from BlueJeans, Pexip, and Polycom to support interoperability for meetings in Teams with existing hardware investments.
• Desk and conference phones—New desk phones from AudioCodes and Yealink—and new conference room phones from Crestron, Polycom, and Yealink—run a native Teams application for consistent and streamlined calling experiences.
• Mobile phone stations—New mobile phone stations from Plantronics combine the Teams experience with desk phone capabilities for the mobile user.

To learn more about the portfolio of Teams-powered devices and the roadmap dates, visit the Microsoft Tech Community blog.

Growing ecosystem of Teams apps

No ecosystem would be complete without the apps that make it thrive. We recently released a new store in Teams featuring a wide array of tools and services from our partners. Some of the most popular apps among Teams customers include Adobe Creative Cloud, Hootsuite, InVision, Polly, SurveyMonkey, Trello, Wrike, Zoom.ai, and many others.

Hear it from our customers

As we celebrate our first birthday, what’s most exciting are the stories of companies like RLH Corporation, Technicolor, and General Motors, for which Teams is truly changing the way people come together, innovate, and move business forward.

• RLH Corporation—In 2014, when Greg Mount took on the role of CEO at RLH Corporation, parent company to hotel brands like Red Lion Hotels, GuestHouse, and America’s Best Value Inn, he shifted the company’s strategy to move from being a Pacific Northwest regional brand to being a nationwide one. Since then, RLH Corporation has acquired multiple hotel brands, growing from 62 to over 1,100 hotels in just three years. To address change management and help drive a consistent culture within the company, RLH Corporation started using Teams last year. They looked at other chat-based collaboration tools, but because they were already using Office 365 and Power BI, Teams was the clear choice. Now, all corporate employees use Teams. The leadership team has moved from a more in-person and paper-based process for communications to more real-time interaction and data flow.
• Technicolor—A leader in the media and entertainment sector, Technicolor has used Teams within the Production Services CTO office to provide a new way for employees to collaborate around all things technical—from strategy to purchasing and everything in between. Technicolor Production Services business units are also starting to use Teams for high profile projects that require greater transparency and collaboration across many time zones and global offices, reducing the number of recurring meetings and flow of information internally and benefiting from a sole source of truth with cloud documents. Technicolor Production Services plans to expand its usage within other parts of its organization.
• General Motors—Here’s what Fred Killeen, CTO at General Motors, had to say about Teams: “Our mission to transform transportation relies on strong teamwork across every aspect of our business. Teams enables our employees to connect across geographical and organizational boundaries through a single place to access all the conversations, files, and content. Teams’ integration with the rest of Office 365 and third-party applications and services makes it easier for our employees to find relevant information and do their best work on their own and as a part of a team.”

As we celebrate our first year in market, we are thankful to our customers, partners, and of course those of you who have become avid Teams users for coming on this journey with us. We look forward to continuing to bring you experiences that enable your teams to achieve more together.

Tune in to Microsoft’s keynote at Enterprise Connect this week to hear what’s next in our vision for Intelligent Communications. Watch it live Wednesday, March 14, 2018, at 10 AM ET or watch on-demand at: Enterprise Connect keynote.

—Lori Wright, general manager for Microsoft Teams and Skype

The post Microsoft Teams turns 1, advances vision for Intelligent Communications appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Writing a compelling resume can be a difficult process, but we’ve heard from customers already using Resume Assistant that the new experience is helping them:

“I absolutely love it; I’ve never seen anything like this!”

“I have been struggling trying to figure out how to brush up my resume and these tips took some of the burden off my shoulders.”

“It’s very helpful to have suggestions on the wording to use.”

With over 80 percent of resumes updated in Word, Resume Assistant helps job seekers showcase accomplishments, be more easily discovered by recruiters, and find their ideal job. Our goal is to empower job seekers with the tools to land their dream job. To learn more about Resume Assistant, head over to the official LinkedIn blog or visit Office Support for tips, tricks, and information on how to get started.

Availability:
Resume Assistant is now available to Office 365 subscribers on Windows whose Word 2016 desktop display language is set to English, who are located in and whose Windows region is set to one of the following region locations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and United States. The Region location setting can be found in the Control Panel under Clock, Language, and Region. Resume Assistant can be found in the Review tab of Word.

The post Craft a compelling resume with Resume Assistant, powered by LinkedIn—now available appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Here is an overview of the four new features.

• Schedule view—Meet deadlines, plan ahead, and understand project status with the ability to view your task schedule. In addition, weekly and monthly task views allow drag-and-drop scheduling. Read the support article for more details.

• Group and Filter options—The Group and Filter options in Planner give you deeper insights into your tasks to help you meet key deadlines. For example, filter your tasks by due date to better understand approaching deadlines. Or use the Group feature to view tasks that have not been started, so you can prioritize your work.

• Due date notifications—Receive an email notification summarizing tasks due in the coming week—and stay on top of your approaching deliverables.

• iCalendar format feed (coming soon)—Make better scheduling and time-management decisions by publishing tasks to your calendar. By adding your tasks to your Outlook calendar, you’ll never lose track of current and upcoming tasks—helping you meet your deliverables.

These features have been among the top requests on the Planner UserVoice forum. Schedule view, Group and Filter, and Due date notifications are now available to all Office 365 subscribers. Outlook calendar integration via the iCalendar format feed is rolling out soon. We look forward to your comments and feedback. Feel free to submit feedback through the Planner UserVoice forum. Visit Planner now!

New to Planner?

There’s never been a better time to start using Planner! With these new capabilities, Planner is a complete solution for task and work management. Planner is part of the Office 365 productivity suite and is fully integrated with the other Office 365 applications. And if you’re already using Microsoft Teams, you can host a Planner Plan inside your Teams workspace, so everybody can collaborate in one place. You can also link a Planner Plan to a task in Microsoft Project Online, so your team can track tasks and work details in Planner even when that work is part of a larger Project plan being tracked in Project Online. Visit Planner to learn more.

—The Planner team

The post Conquer time with new features in Microsoft Planner appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

We’re launching into 2018 by bringing great new value to Office 365 subscribers, with updates that enhance how teams work together and unlock new ways to create and manage content across devices. Read on for details.

Get more done in Microsoft Teams

New features for Microsoft Teams enable you to interact with apps in new ways, customize your personal workspace, and take quick actions.

Find and use apps in new ways—Now you can include interactive cards from apps in conversations the same way you would add an emoji or GIF. With one click, you can bring important information, like a task from Trello, into a channel conversation or chat. Finding new apps and services in Teams is now easier with the new Store, where you can search for apps by name or category, such as “Project management” or “Analytics & BI.”

Command apps and take quick actions across Teams—We also introduced the new command box in Microsoft Teams, a single point of entry that integrates your search and command experiences. Now you can quickly interact with apps, perform tasks, and navigate throughout Teams directly from the command box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files, and apps.

Work together more effectively with updates to iOS and Mac

New Office 365 capabilities for iOS and Mac enhance how teams create content together, make it easier to produce advanced documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from anywhere, and introduce new ways to search, preview, and interact with files.

Co-authoring for iOS and Mac—We made it easier for individuals to work together across devices with the general availability of co-authoring in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for iOS and Mac. Now, whether you work on a Mac, PC, or mobile device, you’ll know who else is working with you in a document, see where they’re working, and view changes. Co-authoring is already available on the Office desktop applications for Windows, Office for Android, and Office Online. Learn more at the Microsoft Tech Community.

Automatically save your work on Mac—Today also marks the general availability of AutoSave in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Mac for Office 365 subscribers who store their documents in OneDrive and SharePoint. Whether you’re working alone or with others, your latest changes are now automatically stored in the cloud, so you never need to worry about hitting the Save button again. You can also view and restore content from earlier versions of the document at any time with support for version history.

Drag and drop content and files on iOS—The Office and OneDrive iOS apps now support drag and drop for content and files. One of the most common and powerful tasks when creating content is integrating photos, graphs, and other objects from a variety of sources. Now Office 365 subscribers on iPad and iPhone can easily drag and drop content into documents, presentations, and spreadsheets from other Office apps or OneDrive. Support for drag and drop for iOS also enables you to move files to and from OneDrive and other sources—such as SharePoint or iMessage—making it easier to organize content scattered across different apps and services.

Access OneDrive files from more iOS apps—OneDrive for iOS now natively supports the new iOS 11 Files app. This means iPhone and iPad users can upload, access, edit, and save content to OneDrive or SharePoint from any iOS app that supports File app integration—a top requested feature. Users can also tag their favorite OneDrive and SharePoint files from within the Files app, making it easier to find and use the content that matters to you.

Preview more file types with OneDrive for iOS—We redesigned the OneDrive for iOS app with a more detailed list view, making it easier to scan file names, see relevant information, and sort files by specific attributes. The updated OneDrive for iOS app also creates crisp thumbnails and supports previews for over 130 file types, including Adobe Photoshop and 3D objects, so you can open, view, and share the right content without leaving the app.

Search across your organization with Outlook for iOS—The new search experience in Outlook for iOS leverages the Microsoft Graph to surface results from your top contacts, upcoming travel itineraries, package deliveries, recent attachments, and more. Together with proactive search suggestions and a unified design, it now provides consistent, personalized results that enable you to discover information from across your organization faster.

Improve reading skills with Learning Tools for Mac—Word for Mac now supports Immersive Reader and Read Aloud, tools previously available in Word for Windows and mobile apps. These tools enable content to be viewed in ways that are optimized for learning differences and allow documents to be read back with simultaneous highlighting. These features make it easier to recognize and correct errors as you write, improving reading and editing accuracy for everyone—especially users with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

Additional updates

• New ways to share on Yammer—Earlier this month, we introduced new ways for users to share engaging company-wide content from wherever they are with the Yammer mobile app. Users can now post announcements to groups, add animated GIFs, and more.
• Powerful inclusive learning tools—Last week at Bett, we introduced a range of powerful new tools that make teaching and learning in schools more inclusive and collaborative, including built-in dictation across Office 365 and the expansion of Learning Tools to Mac and iPhone.

Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office for Windows desktops | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office for Android. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider to be the first to use the latest and greatest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Monthly Channel and Semi-Annual Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through Targeted Release (Clients, Services). This site explains more about when you can expect to receive the features announced today.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability:
All updates in this blog have reached general availability and are beginning to roll out to Office 365 subscribers. Microsoft Teams updates are rolling out automatically and you can expect to see them in your Teams desktop client soon. For iOS and Mac updates, check for updates on your device. Some devices may receive these updates later than others.

The post New in January—enriching teamwork across devices appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Earlier today in San Francisco, Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft AI & Research, demonstrated how Microsoft is infusing intelligent technologies across our core products to make artificial intelligence (AI) available to everyone, with the simple goal of helping people deliver their best work.

Office 365 is built on Microsoft’s powerful platform for AI that makes advancements in machine learning and AI accessible to every developer and organization. From document translation to intelligent threat detection, AI is already enhancing the productivity experience of over 120 million commercial Office 365 users.

New Office 365 AI capabilities this month help subscribers discover insights from data, leverage organizational knowledge, arrive on time for events, and more. Read on for details.

Automatically unlock rich insights with AI (preview)

Every day, millions of Office 365 subscribers rely on Excel to perform complex analysis and derive value from their organizations’ data with intelligent tools like Flash Fill and advanced data transformation. For many, however, extracting key insights from a new data set can be intimidating. Today, we’re announcing the preview of Insights in Excel—a new service that automatically highlights patterns it detects, which makes it easier for everyone to explore and analyze their data. Powered by machine learning, Insights helps identify trends, outliers, and other useful visualizations, providing new and useful perspectives on data. Insights begins rolling out in preview to Office insiders this month.

Excel will provide automatic insights.

Master company lingo with machine learning

Every workplace is unique, and understanding the internal acronyms in use across an organization can be essential to success. Today, we announced a new Microsoft Word feature called Acronyms. Powered by machine learning, Acronyms helps people understand shorthand that is commonly used in their own workplaces by leveraging the Microsoft Graph to surface definitions of terms that have been previously defined across emails and documents. Acronyms will begin rolling out to Word Online for Office 365 commercial subscribers in 2018.

Master company acronyms in Word Online.

Get to events on time with Outlook

In 2017, we rolled out several new capabilities in Outlook that help users automatically detect trips and deliveries, triage email, schedule meetings, and more. Today, we’re expanding this set of AI-powered tools by bringing Cortana to the Outlook mobile app to help users stay on top of their day. When it is time to leave for appointments, Outlook will now send a notification—with directions for both driving and public transit—taking into account current location, the event location, and real-time traffic information. Time to leave in Outlook is rolling out to iOS users this month in markets where Cortana is available.

Outlook will notify you when it’s time to leave for your next event.

Bring people, ideas, and content together with Microsoft Whiteboard Preview

This month, we also announced the preview of Microsoft Whiteboard for Windows 10 devices—a freeform digital canvas where people, ideas, and content can come together. Microsoft Whiteboard Preview is built for teams who ideate and work together across multiple devices and locations. Unlike traditional whiteboards, the app uses AI to recognize freeform drawings and turn them into standard shapes, so it’s easier to create great-looking tables, diagrams, and flowcharts using only a pen. Users can work together in real-time on shared content and automatically save to the cloud to pick their work up later from another device. Microsoft Whiteboard is now available in preview from the Windows Store.

Find text in images with intelligent search

Earlier this year, we introduced the ability for OneDrive and SharePoint to automatically recognize the content within images and detect whiteboards, screenshots, receipts, and more. Today, we are expanding this capability to automatically extract searchable text from those images, making it easier to find a wide range of content, including receipts and business cards, using memorable search terms and without needing to know where the images are stored. Text in image search is currently rolling out and will be available to all Office 365 commercial subscribers by the end of December.

Search for text in images stored in Office 365.

Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office on Windows desktops | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office on Android. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider to be the first to use the latest and greatest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Monthly Channel and Semi-Annual Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through Targeted Release (Clients, Services). This site explains more about when you can expect to receive the features announced today.

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Availability:

• Insights in Excel is starting to roll out in preview to Office 365 commercial subscribers enrolled in Office Insiders, in the United States this month. Because this feature is powered by machine learning, it will provide increasingly advanced analysis as usage of the feature grows over time.
• Acronyms will be rolling out to Word Online for Office 365 commercial subscribers enrolled in Office Insiders in 2018.
• Time to leave is rolling out to Outlook for iOS users in our Insider program this month, and then to all Outlook for iOS users in coming months. We also plan to make it available in Outlook for Android 2018.
• Microsoft Whiteboard Preview is now available for Windows users in the Windows Store.
• Text in image search is currently rolling out to Office 365 commercial subscribers and will be available worldwide by the end of 2017.

The post New to Office 365 in December—extending human ingenuity with everyday AI appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, at LinkedIn’s headquarters in San Francisco, we announced Resume Assistant, a new feature in Microsoft Word to help Office 365 subscribers craft compelling resumes with personalized insights powered by LinkedIn. With over 80 percent of resumes updated in Word, Resume Assistant helps job seekers showcase accomplishments, be more easily discovered by recruiters, and find their ideal job.

The workplace is changing, impacting not only how people work, but also the frequency with which they change roles, introducing new challenges for job seekers. Nearly 70 percent of people say they have difficulty portraying their work experience effectively, and 50 percent struggle to tailor their resume to a specific job opportunity. Furthermore, job applications on LinkedIn have increased 40 percent year-over-year, signaling increased competition for jobs.

Leveraging the power of LinkedIn, Resume Assistant provides intelligent tools to help job seekers improve their resumes, right from within Word.

• Leverage relevant examples—See how top people in a field represent their work experience and filter by industry and role for a personalized experience.
• Identify top skills—Find the most prominent skills for the type of job you’re seeking so you can more easily increase your discoverability.
• Customize a resume based on real job postings—People can see relevant job listings from LinkedIn’s 11 million open jobs and customize their resume to appeal to recruiters.
• Get professional help—Easily connect to ProFinder, LinkedIn’s freelance platform, to get additional hands-on resume writing, interview, and career coaching.
• Let recruiters know you’re open—Candidates can quietly let recruiters know they are open to new opportunities with Open Candidates.

Microsoft and LinkedIn are committed to empowering professionals—both in their current jobs and over the course of their career—with innovative new tools that bring together the world’s largest professional cloud with the world’s largest professional network. Look out for more updates in the coming months.

—Bryan Goode

Availability: Resume Assistant in Microsoft Word begins rolling out this week to Office 365 subscribers that are enrolled in the Office Insiders program on Windows Desktop using English display language. It will be available first in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, New Zealand, United, Kingdom, and United States of America. It will be generally available on more platforms and markets over the coming months.

The post Bringing AI to job seekers with Resume Assistant in Word, powered by LinkedIn appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

An ad-free experience

The Outlook.com interface is now free of ads for Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers. This includes banner ads as well as advertisements in the message list—commonly referred to as native ads. Without ads, you’ll have less distractions and faster page load times, so you can be more focused and have a better email experience.

Sophisticated protection against email threats

Email is one of the most popular ways that criminals trick people into giving away their passwords or downloading viruses and ransomware. That’s why all Outlook.com accounts already feature robust spam and virus filtering and support from a global security team that works tirelessly to stop these threats.

For Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers, we now offer additional security against the most sophisticated types of threats in two ways:

• Scanning attachments—Sophisticated techniques detect new types of malware previously not seen, giving you protection against today’s most advanced threats.
• Checking links—When you click a link in an email, it is checked in real-time to determine if the destination website is likely to download viruses or malware onto your computer. If the site is found to be malicious, a warning screen alerts you not to access the site.

More mailbox storage

In our new Office 365–based infrastructure, a free Outlook.com account now receives 15 GB of email storage space. Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers enjoy even larger amounts of storage: 50 GB of space in total. Today, we’re also boosting storage limits to 50 GB for all our loyal Outlook.com users whose mailbox size is 12 GB or larger.

Premium support

If you need help on an Outlook.com account issue, you’ll receive free technical support as an Office 365 subscriber. Whether you call us on the phone or reach out via in-app support, you get our highest levels of care and support.

How to get started

Getting started and using these premium features in Outlook.com is easy.

• It’s automatic—We activate the premium Outlook.com benefits based on the email address you used to sign up for your Office 365 subscription. Addresses ending in @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, and @msn.com all qualify. Please note that if you use the Connected Accounts feature to access a @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or other third-party account from Outlook.com—the advanced email security features do not apply to these accounts.
• You can share the benefits—If you have an Office 365 Home subscription and share your Office 365 benefits with others, they will get these benefits for their Outlook.com mailboxes—including the advanced security, ad-free experience, and 50 GB of email storage.
• The rollout is underway—We’ve already begun rolling these capabilities out to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers worldwide. The process of updating all accounts will take about one month. So if you don’t see them right away, don’t worry—they are on the way.

To learn more about the features and see a list of frequently asked questions, please check out the Premium Outlook.com features for Office 365 subscribers help topic.

We hope you enjoy these new benefits, and we look forward to bringing even more premium value to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers in the months ahead!

—The Outlook.com team

The post Premium Outlook.com features now available to Office 365 subscribers appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Outlook.com is hosted from multiple datacenters across the world, which provides fault tolerance, load balancing, and performance advantages. Our goal is to set up your Outlook.com account in datacenters that provide you with the best performance. In the U.S. and Europe, that means we will set up your account in datacenters that are in the region where you reside. Historically, we have determined these locations based on the country you selected as your place of residence when you created the account.

But in a world where migration is increasingly common, relying on you to manually keep that place of residence information up to date doesn’t make sense. Our datacenter capacity is also increasing, providing more opportunities to host your data closer to where you are located. Accordingly, we made updates that improve our ability to maintain your Outlook.com data closer to you with greater accuracy.

When you create a new Outlook.com account, we now determine the appropriate datacenters automatically, rather than relying on the country of residence stored in your account profile. So, if you are physically located in the U.S. when setting up your Outlook.com account, your email will be stored in the U.S. Similarly, if you are in Europe when setting up your account, your email will be stored in Europe.

We are also making Outlook.com smart enough to automatically move your account to closer datacenters when the service determines over a period of time that you have changed the region of your primary residence and performance would be improved. For example, if you set up an Outlook.com account in Spain and later relocate your residence to the U.S., your account will be migrated to U.S. datacenters to optimize your access.

Note that we will not continuously move data back and forth between regions every time you travel abroad—the intent here is to improve performance by keeping your data in proximity to where you are primarily located.

We’re always working to ensure you have the best and fastest experience when using our service. Give us your feedback and ask your questions at the Outlook.com UserVoice site.

—The Outlook.com team

The post Delivering a faster and more responsive Outlook.com appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

A big part of our prioritization of new features and enhancements comes from the votes and feedback we receive from you on Outlook UserVoice. We thank you all for your feedback and are excited to hear what you think of our new additions!

Here’s a look at what’s new:

Sync shared calendars to Outlook

You will now be able to view and edit shared Office 365 or Outlook.com calendars, just like you can with your own calendars. Better yet, you can also share your own calendars with others and accept sharing invitations easily right from the app.

If you don’t see your shared calendars right now, don’t worry. We are in the process of upgrading existing shared calendars so that they start syncing to Outlook. However, if you just can’t wait and want the new experience immediately, simply re-accept the sharing invitation from Outlook on iOS or Android. Once you do this, your shared calendar will appear. If you cannot find the original calendar sharing invitation, ask the calendar owner to re-share and accept the new invite from Outlook. And voila!

Manage delegate calendars on the go

For those of you who manage someone else’s calendar at work, you’ll now be able to do this from the palm of your hand. Manage your delegates, accept a delegation request, and fully view and edit the delegated calendar all from Outlook on iOS or Android. And when you receive meeting invitations and responses, we will more clearly indicate if they are for your or your manager’s calendar, so you don’t get them confused.

Get your Meetups added directly to your calendar

Following up on our launch of Facebook and Evernote in Outlook on iOS and Android this year, we are releasing support for Meetup—a new Calendar app in Outlook. Meetup brings people together in thousands of cities to do more of what they want to do in life. Now, when you connect your Meetup account to Outlook, you can see your upcoming Meetups directly on your calendar.

Managing your events is even easier

We are bringing the best of what Outlook has to offer on the web and desktop to your phone, so you can make the most of your busy day while on the go.

These updates are available for both iOS and Android:

• Create events with daily, weekly, monthly or yearly recurrences.
• RSVP to a single occurrence of a recurring event series (e.g. decline one instance without removing the entire series from your calendar).
• See your coworkers’ availability when scheduling meetings (available previously on iOS, now available on Android).

These features are now available on iOS, coming soon to Android:

• Add a message when responding to a meeting invite (e.g. explain why you are declining a meeting invitation.)
• Set an event as private, to keep the details to yourself when sharing your calendar.
• Mark your calendar events as Busy, Free, Out of Office, or Tentative.

And there’s even more to come!

Let us know what you think of our new calendar features! If you have other ideas for what would make the calendar experience even better for you, let us know on UserVoice right from Outlook by going to Settings > Help & Feedback > Suggest a Feature.

—The Outlook team

Frequently asked questions

Q. I don’t see my shared or delegated calendars on in Outlook for iOS and Android yet. What should I do?

A. As noted above if you don’t see your shared or delegated calendars right now, don’t worry. We are in the process of upgrading existing shared calendars so that they start syncing to Outlook. However, if you just can’t wait and want the new experience immediately, simply re-accept the sharing or delegate invitation from Outlook on iOS or Android. Once you do this, your shared calendar will appear. If you cannot find the original calendar sharing invitation, ask the calendar owner to re-share and accept the new invite from Outlook.

Q. How do I add Calendar apps like Meetup to my calendar?

A. To add a Calendar app, such as Meetup, navigate to settings, and then click Calendar Apps in the Connected Apps and Add-ins section. Meetup is available on Android today, coming soon to iOS.

The post Outlook for iOS and Android is adding your most requested calendar features appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Outlook for iOS and Android is on a mission to help you accomplish more with your email and calendar while on the go. With our latest release, we’re addressing one of our most highly requested features with improvements to our People experience.

You now have the ability to add and edit contacts right from Outlook on iOS and Android. We’ve also completely redesigned the contact card to show more details—including latest conversations and shared files—and enabled easier calling and messaging with your contacts.

Here’s a deeper look at what’s new.

Add or edit your important contacts while on the go

With our latest update, you can now add and edit contacts for Outlook.com and Office 365 accounts (support for Google contacts coming soon).

To create a new contact in Outlook, simply go to the People tab and tap the + sign. You can also add a new contact directly from a message or event by tapping the name of a person and then tapping Add Contact. Lastly, you can also use the search bar in the People tab to find and add contacts from your company directory.

Once you’ve added a contact, you can edit their information by opening the contact and tapping the Edit button. Any changes made in Outlook for iOS and Android will be synced and available across all versions of Outlook.

View details about your contacts at a glance

The contact card has also been redesigned to put your contacts’ key details front and center. Tap on any name in your messages or events to access phone numbers, email addresses and other details, like Skype IDs, along with your contact’s picture. Tapping a phone number will allow you to choose between calling, messaging or FaceTiming your contact.

The new contact card now also displays your recent conversations, shared attachments and any upcoming meetings you have with that person.

Save contacts to your device

While you can fully manage your contacts in Outlook, you can also save your contacts to the default Contacts app on iOS and Android. This allows you to easily see the name of a contact when you receive a call or text message from them, and view all of their contact information directly in the built-in Contacts app.

Due to the underlying capabilities of iOS and Android, how this works differs slightly by platform.

On iOS, Outlook provides a one-way push of contact information from Outlook to your phone. All newly added contacts and changes should be made in the Outlook app, and these changes will sync to your built-in Contacts app and your email service. However, edits made in the Contacts app will not sync back to Outlook or your email service, and will be overwritten the next time Outlook syncs to the Contacts app. You should avoid making edits in the Contacts app. To enable Caller ID with your Outlook contacts, navigate to your account within Settings and tap Save Contacts.

On Android, Outlook is able to fully synchronize with the Contacts app. Therefore, users can choose to add new contacts or make changes in either the Outlook app or by using the built-in Contacts app on Android. Changes made in either location will sync back to your email service. To enable full contact sync on Android, navigate to your account within Settings and tap Sync Contacts.

If you’d like to remove the contacts at a later time, you can toggle the switch in Outlook and they will be removed from your address book.

Got a feature request?

Let us know what you think of our new People experiences! If you have other ideas for what would make Outlook even better for you, let us know right from Outlook by going to Settings > Suggest a Feature.

—The Outlook team

The post Improving People in Outlook for iOS and Android appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today’s post was written by Ori Artman, general manager of Microsoft To-Do.

Today we’re excited to introduce a new, intelligent task management app that makes it easy to plan and manage your day. Say hello to Microsoft To-Do—now available in Preview.

Microsoft To-Do comes from the team behind the Wunderlist app, and delivers a smarter, more personal and intuitive way to help people stay organized and get the most out of every day. Powered by Office 365 integration and an intelligent algorithm, it is the first step on our journey to simplify task management and help you achieve more.

All your to-dos in one place

Microsoft To-Do helps you create a list for anything—for work, home projects or just your groceries. You can keep track of deadlines by adding reminders, due dates and notes, and personalize each list with colourful themes. You can access your lists from anywhere with the Microsoft To-Do apps for iPhone, Android phone, Windows 10 devices and the web.

Plan your day with Intelligent Suggestions

Managing your to-dos and lists can sometimes take as much effort as completing them. Microsoft To-Do helps you focus and plan your day from the moment you open the app. Every morning, your My Day list starts out with a clean slate, allowing you to be more intentional about what you want to get done.

You can also tap Intelligent Suggestions for ideas on what’s most important. Just tap the lightbulb, and you’ll see any to-dos from the day before, what’s due or upcoming, and other helpful suggestions based on Microsoft To-Do’s smart algorithm. Just add the ones you want to get done to My Day.

Integration with Microsoft Office

Microsoft To-Do is built on Office 365, which in coming months will enable the product to be even more useful in more places. Our first integration with Outlook makes it easy to stay on top of your Outlook Tasks from anywhere. It will automatically sync your Tasks with Microsoft To-Do, and allow you to access and manage them across devices.

As the only task management app built on an enterprise cloud, Microsoft To-Do offers the advanced security that our Office 365 customers expect. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and Microsoft To-Do is served out of our hyper-scale, global network of data centers. For commercial users, IT professionals can now enable the Microsoft To-Do Preview through the Office 365 admin center.

What’s next

Today’s Microsoft To-Do Preview would not have been possible without the support and input of Wunderlist fans over the last six years. In the coming months, we’ll bring more of the favorite elements of Wunderlist into the Microsoft To-Do experience, adding features such as list sharing, apps for Mac, iPad and Android tablet, as well as additional integrations with other Microsoft services. Once we are confident that we have incorporated the best of Wunderlist into Microsoft To-Do, we will retire Wunderlist. While the name and icon may change, the team that brought you Wunderlist continues on. We look forward to making Microsoft To-Do even more useful, intuitive and personal.

Get Microsoft To-Do Preview for iPhone, Android, Windows and the web today.

We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what you think would make Microsoft To-Do even better. You can talk to us via our in-app contact form, on UserVoice, Twitter or on Facebook.

—Ori Artman

The post Introducing Microsoft To-Do—now available in Preview appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.