Oct 27, 2015 - In part two of our deep dive into the new Microsoft Office, we show you step by step how to use three of the best new features in Word 2016.
Microsoft, a major update for the enterprise. It’s an that hits on all of the right touch-points. There is now a co-authoring feature in Word where you can. The desktop suites can now use multi-factor authentication for better security. And, there’s a host of new features that are designed to make you.
Other than the co-authoring, which I, there’s a new feature in Microsoft Word 2016 called Tell Me that’s a real game changer for those in business or just making a shopping list. The name Tell Me is an interesting choice of words for the feature, considering Microsoft used to own a speech processing company called Tellme up until 2012.
It pops up in Word as a small field above the ribbon and seems rather unimportant. Yet, as productivity software gets ever-more complex, the feature is a godsend. You can type just about anything you want and Word will show you the menu choices related to that objective.
It means you don’t have to read through mountains of documentation or view any training videos. You barely need to know which new features are included in Word 2016. You just need an inkling of what you want to do. Related: I tried this for a few tasks. I wanted to do a smart look-up for a phrase, so I selected it and then typed “smart lookup” in the Tell Me field. It showed that option with some background info, so I didn’t have to wade through any menus.
I heard about a few new charts types, but I forgot how to even add a chart. I typed “chart” and saw the option to add one. I know there is a way to share a document with another person if you save it on OneDrive, so I typed “share” and found the option easily. In a few cases, a feature I wanted to look into didn’t show up. For example, I remember hearing that you Skype now integrates into Office 2016 but Tell Me wasn’t that helpful.
You can use it to search the Web to find out more about Skype, but you can’t find out anything else. Tell Me is not just for new users.
In many ways, it is for advanced users who just forget how to use advanced features or use so many apps they get them confused easily. In fact, new users might not need Tell Me because they will stick to the basics - typing documents, saving them, printing them. If they do stumble into the feature or wonder why there is a field above the ribbon, they will find many useful options. If you type “print” you can print, see printing options, or adjust the page settings. If you type “spell” you can check spelling but also change the language you use for a document. Dividing this bridge between new users and power users is what makes the Tell Me feature so useful.
It’s one of those unusual extras in a high-end application that helps with random discovery. For example, you can type “table” and find out that Word lets you draw a table.
That might not be obvious if you have come back to Word after sticking with an online app for many years. You can literally stumble into power features.
Word 2016 has found a delicate balance. It is a desktop app with a classic (read: reliable and secure) tone.
It sits in the Windows 10 Start menu and is available in just two clicks. You can use it on a plane without having to pay for Wi-Fi access. (Google Docs has an offline mode, but it’s still somewhat limited - at least for me, I can never get the spell check to work.) Yet, Microsoft has done a good job making Office 2016 and specifically Word 2016 feel as though it is cloud-enabled. When you save a document to OneDrive, you can quickly load it on your iPhone or Android device without having to figure out which version is the latest. All of this is enough to make me want to stick with Word for a while, even though I tend to use Google Docs normally. (One of my main reasons I use Docs is simply that I can click one tab over to check email.) With Word 2016, the power and extra features, not to mention the ease of exploring the new features, is enough to make me go back and stick with this app - for now.
Word has always been the workhorse app of the Microsoft Office suite, and Word 2016 is no different than past versions. Nearly everyone who uses Office ends up using Word at some point, whether it be for writing memos, typing up agendas, creating reports, crafting business correspondence or any of a thousand other uses. The current version, Word 2016, was released in late 2015 when the, and by now many businesses have moved to it.
But although you may have upgraded to the latest version, you might be missing out on some worthwhile features introduced in Word 2016 for Windows — that’s what we’ll look at in this story. Related: Your copy of Word 2016 may be part of the standalone Office software suite or part of an Office 365 subscription for business, home, or education. But that doesn't matter; except as noted below, all the tips here apply to whatever version of Word 2016 you're using. Share this story: IT pros, we hope you’ll pass this guide on to your users to explain the Word 2016 ropes. Use the Ribbon The Ribbon interface in Word 2016 hasn’t changed much compared to earlier versions. The Ribbon has been included in Office suite applications since Office 2007, so you’re probably familiar with how it works. But if you need a refresher, see our.
Just as in, the Ribbon in Word 2016 is flatter-looking, cleaner and less cluttered than the one in Word 2010 and 2007. The 2016 Ribbon is smaller than in Word 2013, the title bar is now solid blue rather than the previous white, and the menu text (File, Home, Insert and so on) is now a mix of upper- and lowercase rather than all caps. There are other minor changes as well — for instance, the old Page Layout tab is now called just Layout — but the Ribbon still works in the same way and you'll find most of the commands in the same locations as in Word 2013. Preston Gralla / IDG The Ribbon in Word 2016 is smaller than in Word 2013 and is solid blue rather than white. (Click image to enlarge it.) To find out which commands live on which tabs on the Ribbon, download our. Also see the nifty new Tell Me feature described below.
Just as in earlier versions of Word, to make the commands underneath the tabs on the Ribbon go away, press Ctrl-F1. To make the commands appear again, press Ctrl-F1. (Note that the Ribbon tabs — File, Home, Insert and so on — stay visible.) Preston Gralla / IDG Here are the Ribbon display options. You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon display options icon at the top right of the screen, just to the left of the icons for minimizing and maximizing Word. A drop-down menu appears with these three options:.
Auto-hide Ribbon: This hides the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them. To show the Ribbon again, click at the top of Word. Show Tabs: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them.
It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display icon and select “Show Tabs and Commands.”.
Show Tabs and Commands: Selecting this shows both the tabs and commands. And if for some reason that blue on the title bar is too much color for you, you can turn it white, gray or black. To do it, select File Options General. In the 'Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office' section, click the down arrow next to Office Theme and select Dark Gray, Black or White from the drop-down menu. To make the title bar blue again, choose the Colorful option from the drop-down list. Just above the Office Theme menu is an Office Background drop-down menu — here you can choose to display a pattern such as a circuit board or circles and stripes in the title bar. If you're working on a document you've saved in OneDrive or SharePoint, a new button appears on the Ribbon, just to the right of the Share button.
It's the Activity button, and it's particularly handy for shared documents. Click it and you'll see the history of what's been done to the document, notably who has saved it and when. To see a previous version, click the 'Open version' link underneath when someone has saved it, and the older version will appear.
Preston Gralla / IDG The Activity pane shows who's done what to a shared document. (Click image to enlarge it.) There’s also useful change in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click File on the Ribbon: If you click Open or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you've connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You'll be able to see at a glance which is which. Preston Gralla / IDG Select “Add a Place” to add a new cloud storage service for Word. (Click image to enlarge it.) To comment on this story, visit.
Collaborate in real time The biggest feature that’s new in Word 2016 is real-time collaboration that lets people work on documents together from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, a feature that Google Docs has long had. There are only two requirements for collaboration in Word 2016: You must be logged into your Microsoft or Office 365 account, and the document must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.
To collaborate on a document, first open it, then click the Share icon in the upper-right part of the screen. If you haven’t yet saved your file in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online, you’ll be prompted to do so. What happens next depends on whether your document is stored in your own OneDrive or with OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. When Word 2016 for Windows was first launched, all document sharing was done via the Share pane. In May 2017, Microsoft rolled out a new sharing interface to enterprise Office 365 users — i.e., those who store.