What’s new in Office 365 in October 2018?
This post will give you a quick rundown of the latest Office 365 updates, with the goal of helping you get the most out of the service.
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Here is a video of the latest Office 365 updates:
Here are the updates discussed in detail:
Office 365: Get even more from your Home or Personal subscription –
- Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscriptions previously included device install limits. Office 365 Home limited subscribers to 10 devices in total, across five users, and Office 365 Personal limited subscribers to one PC or Mac and one tablet.
- As of October 2nd, subscribers can install Office on an unlimited number of devices—and be signed into their accounts on up to five of those devices at the same time.
- And, for those with bigger families we’re also increasing the number of licenses in a Home subscription from five to six, with no change in price. To be clear, that’s six people with their own Office license and 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage each, for a total of 6 TB.
OneDrive: OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac –
- Microsoft has announced a preview for an enhancement to OneDrive called Files On-Demand that has been available on Windows for a few months. Files On-Demand for Mac makes it easy to have access to all your files, but only have files you need to be stored locally on the device, thereby reducing the amount of local storage space consumed. You don‘t have to change the way you work, because all your files can be seen in Finder and work just like every other file on your device.
- Files On-Demand for Mac is now available for Office Insiders on macOS Mojave and can also be enabled by running a simple script.
OneDrive: Super Zoom on iOS –
- Who doesn’t store pictures on their phone or tablet, right? The new Super Zoom feature enables OneDrive on iOS users to use a pinch gesture to zoom in and out of the Photos view. Zoom out to easily scroll many photos at a time or zoom in to get a larger preview of your photos as you browse. This feature is supported on both OneDrive for Business as well as consumer accounts on iOS.
- For those of you using OneDrive on Android devices, Super Zoom is already available, but only for OneDrive consumer accounts and should be coming to OneDrive for commercial accounts later this year.
Word & PowerPoint: Use @mention in comments to tag someone for feedback –
- When you use what is commonly known as the “at” sign with someone’s name in social media apps like Twitter or Facebook, the person you mention receives a notification about that post or comment. You might also be using what I’ll call @mentions in Microsoft Teams, and Yammer, and I covered their introduction into Outlook a while back.
- Now you can use @mentions in Word and PowerPoint to draw someone’s attention to comments in a document or presentation you’re collaborating on. Just add the @ sign, then type the name of and the person in your organization you are collaborating with. That person receives an email with a link directly to your comment. Clicking the link brings them into the document or presentation and into the conversation. Using @mentions in Office can help take the lag time out of the collaboration process helping you get more work done, faster.
Outlook: A new user experience designed for Simplicity –
- One of the new features being showcased using the new Coming Soon feature pane is the new Simplified Ribbon. It lets you focus on the core of what you need, displaying a single row of commands versus the three lines of commands in the classic ribbon. It is still easily expandable so you’re always in control. The default set of commands in the simplified ribbon are those that are used most frequently, and less frequently used commands are always still available with just a click or two.
- In addition to the simplified ribbon, Microsoft have made updates across the entire mail and calendar experience to improve productivity and keep you more organized.
Power BI Built-in report theme options –
- The Power BI team recently added the option to apply new built-in themes to Power BI reports, similar to what you can do with Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You’ll be able to see these new theme options by selecting Switch Theme in the Home ribbon in Power BI Desktop.
- All you need to do is pick your desired theme from one of seven new options, and it will be applied to all your visuals that use the default color palette.
SharePoint: New file template management for document library content types –
- SharePoint has been at the heart of document-centric collaboration since long before Office 365 existed. SharePoint content types are essential to our vision of how we’ll continue to deliver content services innovation in Office 365 and by extension, Microsoft 365. That’s why it’s so thrilling to announce the ability to add document templates to SharePoint document library content types.
- We’re also adding the ability to edit the New menu – to add, hide or reorder the new file options. With this new capability, you can maintain the default templates for things like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint along with any newly added templates and content types specific to your requirements. You can configure the New menu by selecting (or deselecting) which templates you wish to see and by using drag and drop to re-order the templates in the menu. You can edit the template directly in the Office client, change the template’s content type or delete the template.
