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3 min read

What’s New: November 2013

Happy Holidays from the Office 365 team!  November has been a busy month with almost all the different services across Office 365 seeing updates.  The biggest news is the real time co-authoring across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Web Apps, now you can see people working together on a document simultaneously.  OneNote for Windows Store received a bunch of new features including better capture of documents, whiteboards and other physical text and bringing that directly into your notebooks. Office 365 business users can now work in four new languages and a host of mobile improvements for SharePoint, Yammer, and Office 365 admin help you get things done while on the go!  Let us know your favorite new feature in the comments. If you missed last month’s updates, see October’s What’s New summary here.

Office 365 Home Premium & Office 365 University updates:

 

Real time co-authoring across the Office Web Apps – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Web Apps now show people working together in documents simultaneously.

Word Web App updates – New features include ability to find and replace words and phrases, apply styles and formatting to tables, and insert headers and footers for more professional reports and papers

Excel Web App updates – New features include drag and drop cells and reorder sheets, a quick analysis of a range of data right in the status bar, including sum, count, and average of a selected range of cells, and support for more workbook types including opening and interacting with spreadsheets that have Sheet Protection.

OneNote Windows Store update – New Share Charm and Camera Scan integration makes it easier for you to capture your screen, documents, and whiteboards bringing the physical notes into your notebook.  Optical Character Recognition searches your image captures for text, and Recent Notes and Page Previews help you quickly navigate your notebook.  Finally improved inking gives you more options for annotating your notes and captures.

Office Remote from Microsoft Research – Microsoft Research is releasing an app that lets you control a PowerPoint presentation from your Windows Phone.

Offie 365 for business updates*:

 

Real time co-authoring across the Office Web Apps – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Web Apps now show people working together in documents simultaneously.

Word Web App updates – New features include ability to find and replace words and phrases, apply styles and formatting to tables, and insert headers and footers for more professional reports and papers

Excel Web App updates – New features include drag and drop cells and reorder sheets, a quick analysis of a range of data right in the status bar, including sum, count, and average of a selected range of cells, and support for more workbook types including opening and interacting with spreadsheets that have Sheet Protection.

OneNote Windows Store update – New Share Charm and Camera Scan integration makes it easier for you to capture your screen, documents, and whiteboards bringing the physical notes into your notebook.  Optical Character Recognition searches your image captures for text, and Recent Notes and Page Previews help you quickly navigate your notebook.  Finally improved inking gives you more options for annotating your notes and captures.

Office Remote from Microsoft Research – Microsoft Research is releasing an app that lets you control a PowerPoint presentation from your Windows Phone.

Improved Message Center – Messages are now more specific to your Office 365 account, helping you stay current with Office 365.

Yammer integration updates – Yammer mobile app updates across, Windows Phone, Windows 8, and iPad improve the tablet experience for organizing inbox messages, notifications and more.  Better email interpretability so that users can contribute to Yammer group conversations without leaving their inbox.

Office 365 now available in 141 markets – Office 365 is expanding to 17 new markets and supporting 4 new languages, Indonesian, Kazakh, Hindi, and Hebrew.

Lync 2013 desktop client update – New features include inline photos during an IM conversation, ability to manage your photo, recording quality options for 720P and 1080P video, and Login trace files to help admins with troubleshooting login issues.

Touch Design mobile experience – We are redesigning the SharePoint Online SkyDrive Pro and Sites experiences for touch across mobile devices making it easier for you to view, share, and explore documents and SharePoint team sites.

SharePoint Online improves external sharing – New features make external sharing easier with Get a Link for anonymous Guest Links, enabling all  site members to share with external users, and the auto-generated sharing email includes all invitees on the To line.

Office 365 Admin App – Office 365 Admins can now see their Office 365 service health dashboard on their Windows Phone, with iPhone and Android versions coming soon.

Office 365 Message Encryption – Announcing an upcoming service that will enable you to send encrypted email to people outside your Office 365 organization.

 

Please note that some of the above updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide.

–Andy O’Donald @andyodonald

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*Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics.