Coming up, we'll take a look at the latest desktop collaboration
updates and experiences for Office on
Windows including continued updates to
real-time collaboration in Word and
PowerPoint as well as new built-in chat
capabilities, visibility into your
activity on files and improved access to
your content in recent folders, content
shared with me or stored within sites
and groups, our expanded recent files
list and more. I'm joined today by Daniel Escapa
from the office collab team. Welcome
Thank you. It's great to be here. So we've
recently expanded real-time
collaboration co-authoring really beyond
Word and into the other Office apps. How
does the team think about collaboration?
Yeah, as you mentioned we recently brought
real-time co-authoring to the PowerPoint
version of the Office desktop Windows
application and we're also bringing it
to the Excel now in preview. So
beyond that when we think about
collaboration we actually think about
three main areas: the first one is the
overall co-authoring experience for
desktop applications to enable multiple
people to work together at the same time
without being locked out. Being able to
focus on working together at the same time.
Second of all is asynchronous
collaboration. People don't always
collaborate at the same time, so we've
made it easier for you to work together
with each other and know who's been
making changes since you were last there. And finally getting back to your content
getting back to your files is important
we've lit up new the Office 365
experiences directly in the desktop
application so you can get access to things like your recent list of
files the sites and groups and your
"shared with me" file list. Now all this
integration also means that you can get
to the files that you might have spun
up in tools like Microsoft teams
because they're ultimately using
SharePoint and Onedrive for Business to
host their files and you'll see these
show up in your recent files list. Can
you show us what's new starting with
PowerPoint? Sure. So here I am in
PowerPoint and if you're like me you
probably start working on a deck but you
need other people's help. You know I
can't just do it alone I need two people
to help fill in their slides or give
feedback and give some comments and
stuff like that. So what I have is
a new presentation. I've started
putting in some content but I want to be
able to share it out and what I want to
do here is I'm going to quickly go up
here to the share button we put this in
the front and center of the application
here so that people can quickly share.
I'm going to type in a couple co-workers
names here. Today you're going to be
"Adele" Jeremy. I hope that's okay?
Yep. And we actually have a couple people
in here. I can actually type in my
coworkers there. It uses Outlook to get that
information. I can change permission if I
want for this one. I just want to give
edit rights. And if I want to leave a message I
can do that. Okay, now I started with a
blank new document and what we've done
is a new improvement to make it easy for
you to upload and get it into the cloud. So
I'm just going to choose my account and
I'm going to call it "product review for
Friday" and what that will do is it will go
and save the file to my OneDrive for
Business it will go ahead and share it
out with everybody and it will be in the
cloud. So for me, I can now access this on
any of my devices. And for Adele and for
Diego and for whomever else, they would
get a sharing email, they get a push
notification, and they'll also have it in
their "shared with me" list. This is really
what makes the collaboration possible,
because you have to essentially store
that file in OneDrive or SharePoint. So if
we move over to my desktop. Here I've
actually got the sharing invite. You're
playing the part of "Ben Walters" today.
I'll click on that and I see this
"Product Review for Friday" and when I
click into that file you'll see I've got
the same thing open. It's going to open
in PowerPoint Online the nice thing is
we can actually co-author together in
the document - whether we're using the
rich client or we're using the online
client. So we go ahead and click "edit"
"edit in browser" and that's going
to let me see all the things that you're
doing. And you can actually see where I'm
at. Yeah, that's great and I can actually
see up here. You know we really want to
bring people front and center. You know
when you're working with other people
you want to feel connected with your
co-workers you want to see them. So in
the top right hand corner there I can
see people's faces I can see their names.
I can see where they are and if I want to
kick off an individual chat with them, I
could do that right in here. And what I
really love about this is I like to be
able to go find out where
people are and go work with them. So here
I can see that you're on slide 4. I'm
going to go to slide 4. And in PowerPoint
we have these presence indicators on the
left hand side for the different slides
you can actually see that these two
people are here on this individual slide.
And we have the presence indicators on
the shapes themselves where I can see
people are there and typing. I can go up
here and type in my little part up here
and all of our changes will be syncing
together in real time. We can see
each other's updates and saves. And all
the content just popping in right here.
So we're all working together without
having any other issues. Other people
could join if they want really want. We really want to
make it easy for you to work together
and
have everyone there. We've heard from
customers that they've been really
wanting to be able to do that without
being blocked by file locks and stuff
like that. One other thing we heard was
that you know how do i chat with people?
Like you and i were right here together
but sometimes you're working people in a
different building or across the country.
How do you kick off some type of
communication with them? So we've also
added a doc chat feature so I can click
on this and it will pop up a chat with
the people that are currently in the
file. So you can actually chat with them
in real time in case you need to we
really want to have these updates and Office makes it so you could work
together you could create from beginning
to end - all within Office without needing
to use anything else. And this is really
great for people that are working on the
file at the exact same time but what if
I've got folks that are maybe on
different shifts or they're in different
time zones across the world, how would I
do things asynchronously? Yeah that's
right, oftentimes you work with people, for example, I'm a night owl so I like
working at night but other people you
know might work at different times.
So how do we help you know what's
been going on? So one other update we've
done is we have an activity feed a
little button here so what I can do is I
can click on activity. What it does is it
brings all of the history and activity
inside the file here. I like to think
about it like the story who's been
working on it, who's been doing which
things in the file. How does this compare
to what I can see in terms of versioning
in SharePoint for example? Yeah you're
exactly right, this actually uses the
SharePoint (version history) technology on the backend to
power this and with one of the recent
updates, we now have the
versioning inside of OneDrive consumer
as well as what we had for OneDrive for
Business as well as SharePoint. And since
it is the existing version stuff you can
actually click on one of these and open up
that old version and find a bit of
content that you think may have been
lost or just restore the whole version.
We really want you to not have to worry
about those things. This has been a real
lifesaver for me because this is a case
where a lot of times I might have
another co-author or editor on the file
they delete maybe a whole chapter worth
of content in Word or a whole sheet
inside of Excel I can bring those things
back using the versioning right there in
my doc.That's exactly right.
We really want you to be able to.
Your work matters and we don't want
you to worry about it. We want you to share
and work together without having
any fear that things will be
lost or deleted. We also brought
capabilities that were spread across the
browser experiences so things that we
just saw here. These were things that might
have been in say OneDrive or SharePoint -
really there front and center inside in
the Office app experience. You don't have
to leave the context of those apps. But
what else has the team been doing in
terms of helping you find
files that you're looking for? Yeah we
really want to make sure that you know
you can get all the locations.
There's a bunch of different locations
across Office 365 and we want to put
everything right there inside of Word
Excel and PowerPoint in the file menu. So
let me show you a couple of the updates
that we have made. So first of all, we
have one of my favorite things which is
the most recently used files.
I use this all the time to get back
to what I've been working on. And it
it helps me get find my work. And
this is the same list that I might use
in OneDrive for Business for example or
things I might see in a browser if I log
into Office 365. Right exactly, so
this list will actually roam across all
of your devices, so all your cloud files
you can actually then access and see
them on all your devices. For me, I really
like that I can actually pin items, the
really important things that I'm working
on, so we can actually do is you can
actually take any of these items and pin it.
Then it will actually put it at the top
of your list and that roams across all
of your devices. Additionally, if you are
just using on your local hard drive, the
the recent list does show those files as
well. And those recents really, really
help you again like you said finding
files across all the devices that you
might log in with mobile versions of
Office as well as the desktop, like we
see here in OneDrive for Business. But there
are other things that you're going to
want to do in terms of finding content.
So what else have you worked on there?
So the team has been really hard at
work on a few things. Let me show you a
few of them. First of all is "Shared
with me." So as people are working
together and sharing more, we really want
people to be able to find that stuff.
Before I think we would
search for your inbox trying to find
those things. So now inside of File > Open > Shared with me. You have a whole list of
all the files that have been shared with
you, who's been working on those
files, you can actually find that in one
quick list. This is a huge contrast
because a lot of people might spend time
going into their (email) inbox and find that
sharing mail or again logging into the
browser and trying to look at that
"Shared with me" list that OneDrive for
Business has. Again I can use that right
within the context of Word in this case
or Excel or PowerPoint and just get to
those files that were shared with me.
Exactly, so the other updates that we've
had is a lot of people use sites
and groups; SharePoint sites are
the foundation of many of the
technologies in Office 365 things like
Microsoft Teams, the classroom, modern
groups. So we really want to do is as
those are there, we want to help people
find that stuff so you can go to File >
Open and inside of this you can see all
of your sites and groups. I only have a
few here but if you have more sites and
groups, you'll see them all in here. You
can quickly go into all the files in
those groups. And one of the final
updates we've had is we've
heard a lot from people
where they want to get back to recent
folders, like, "hey I'm always
saving this in this team site or in this
location." So inside of file > save you have
a list of recent folders here so you can
have those important folders where
you're always saving things - for like a
monthly review or anything else - all
right here. And this should save you a
lot of time in terms of time team for
all these files like I was mentioning
earlier because I can not only find the
files I'm looking for but even save me
time in terms of getting to the folders
where I want to save content. Yeah, that's
right, we really wanted to make all three
of these help you find you know things
that are shared with you all the places
that you're working and get right back
to them so everything is right there inside of Office. It's a really
great tour and all of these things that
were kind of in the browser and spread
across Office 365 native now and within
the context of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
like we saw today, but where would I go
to check this out and try to try out these
experiences? So all these updates
will be available for Office 365
subscribers and if you're a tech
enthusiast and you want to try stuff
before everyone else you can actually
join our Office Insiders program and you
can try it out give us feedback your IT
Pro make sure you're on First
Release it'll be coming soon to your
tenant. Another great tip for the IT pros
watching you can actually target first
release just a few individuals in your
organization, maybe the IT department, a
few champions there as well. And of
course, keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest in tech updates across
Microsoft. Thanks for watching and bye
for now!