Coming up on the show,
we'll look at the latest in intelligent Office app experience.
Including new capabilities in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.
As well as updates to Personal Work Analytics.
We'll look at the newly-released browser-based experiences
including the new customizable app launcher.
And, great additions to help you get work done while on the go.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined once again been Ben Walters from the Office Apps team, welcome.
Great to be here.
There's been a lot of great updates to Office 365
really spanning the desktop, the browser, and the phone.
Can you give us a look?
Sure, so let's start with some of the intelligence based capabilities of Office.
If we think about the Office core authoring applications,
they're really there to help people create beautiful content.
And we used historically user agents like Clippy
to allow people to find help topics that would give them access to features.
We evolved that into a more natural language service that would give them "Tell Me".
So they could find features directly in the product.
But, as we move forward
we can now start to infuse the power of the Microsoft graph
right into the product to help people create more beautiful output quicker.
One of the features we release with PowerPoint a little while ago was a feature called powerpoint designer.
We've continued to evolve that service on the back-end to make that even more useful for people.
To access it, simply go in and insert a couple of pictures into my presentation here.
I've got a picture of Elon Musk and Tesla model S.
As I insert those, you'll notice PowerPoint naturally overlays those images.
But the designer service kicks in and starts to present me with these beautiful slide designs
that I can start to then use to make my slides look beautiful no matter what's happening.
We're using some really subtle intelligence features in the background here with these designs.
So as I click through these were using salient region detection to ensure
that the focal point of Elon's face in that model S car
are actually coming into the form no matter where they are.
We're also assisting color palettes across those images as well.
So the other elements in the slides feel like they're part of those mages
and feel like they're part of that slide design.
Now we can continue to evolve that service even further
with things like more densely populated slides with text.
As I move down to this other slide, I have a process flow for
how to make the best fresh press coffee.
And as I look at my slide designs we now have smart art objects to help you make these beautiful layouts that
help get that process flow across while still beautiful.
Right, one of the harder things to do is actually get these text based slides to look great.
But I know we can do even better by using the cloud in terms of getting started with the new presentation.
Yeah, one of the things that's the big challenge for creating these slides
is how do I get past that cold start mentality.
With PowerPoint Quickstarter, we can use the full power of the cloud to build a new presentation outline.
So we access this from the template page.
Keeping in the vein of Elon Musk and electric cars,
I'm simply going to search for that.
So "electric cars" is my term.
I'm going to hit Search.
Using the power of the cloud we can now pull back content information to go and build my presentation.
I go and select the different sections I want in my presentation.
Maybe I'm to going to go in and search a couple of different ones here and hit next.
Select a template.
What will happen is PowerPoint will go and talk to the Bing knowledge graph
to bring back all of the information and build that slide outline for me.
That's right, and we're really pulling in some great images here
from Bing and Cloud services.
Yeah, but it goes a step further as well.
So as I go through some of these slides, I get a beautiful table of contents.
As I start to drill into some of the more topics slides
I don't get the actual information, but I get prompted on things that I should talk about.
So If I'm looking at economics or maybe I should talk about price or maintenance.
I can look at the risk of fire or vehicle safety.
So it's actually giving me all the information I need to go out and further flesh out my presentation.
It's really a huge time-saver, especially if i'm creating presentations.
But, I know we're doing more even if you're going to start creating documents in Word.
That's right so one of the other areas that we recently announced was a feature called "Word Tap".
As we started to think about really bringing the power of the Microsoft Graph
right into the authoring applications.
Tap is one of the areas that shows up in a really big way.
So I have here a document and we know with Word we tend to use this to build reports
and collate information from other sources
On the Insert tab, I can actually select document item.
And this goes out and talks to the cloud and brings back all those recent documents I've been working on.
The beauty here is I can actually drill into something like an excel graph
and start to see all of the different charts that are in that document and simply click to insert those.
Now the beauty is these graphs are not just images, they're the actual object.
So as I select that I can go ahead and change the design and the color layout.
to match the document that I'm working on.
Just the same way I would if I had done a copy or paste or inserted a chart directly in,
but in a much quicker way.
So this is really pulling all the content in from the most recently used document,
that you've been working on.
Really taking those graphs and things that Delve can pull out
and putting them right there on the right-hand flexpane.
That's right and still honoring all of the security and the controls that we have
so nothing there that I don't already have access to, won't show up.
We also continue to evolve Word to help me create more comprehensible documents as well.
So if I move over to another document here,
we can see here we have all the standard spell-checking experiences that I've seen before.
And if I for example click on "Principle", I not only get the
correct spelling of the word, but I get the definitions to make sure that I have the right word
in place as part of that.
We've also gone a step further with machine learning to help understand people's writing styles
and help them create more professional documents.
So down here I have a couple of different examples.
So, for example worthiness and redundancy.
I have a sentence that says her backpack was very large in size.
If I go ahead and right-click that you can see that word is actually suggesting that I use more concise language.
So maybe I can change that down to "her backpack was very large".
So some of the other examples we can see is
where we have more informal language or colloquialism.
Say I have a sentence here that says, "we have comfy massage chairs in our focus rooms".
If I right click that it's going to suggest you use more professional language like,
"We have comfortable massage chairs in our focus rooms".
We can also target things like gender specific language.
So here I have, "The state should hire more policemen".
If I right click that, Word will suggest to say: "The State should hire more police officers".
These are really useful ways we're using machine learning
to be able to understand language and provide better suggestions
to create better documents that are more easily understood.
Right, so we've seen PowerPoints and all the great updates for Word.
But, how about excel, is there anything new there?
Yes so with the new Office add-in platform,
we've actually seen a lot of third parties create great tools and add-ins for excel
that allow us to take advantage of Azure machine learning and the power of the Cloud.
You can see here I have an excel document that's got some text-based responses
and feedback that we've taken from Facebook or other sources.
But, with the Azure Machine Learning add-in
I can actually run text sentiment analysis across this data
and start to get a score based on those responses.
So what I've got here is all of my comments and I actually have roughly 1,600 rows of data in here.
I'm simply going to go ahead
and run a text sentiment analysis in the Cloud over that data.
Within a couple of seconds you'll see I actually have a score
and a positive and negative sentiment analysis come back over that.
As you can see here things like: "Great- is pefect",
gives me a high confidence score that that's a positive sentiment.
As we start to get two things that a little bit harder to assess like: "easy but not so good",
where I've got positive and negative words mixed.
We can actually go through and assess that and it's given a negative response
with a negative sentiment score on that.
You can see some of this data here is geo-referenced.
And with a new map chart visualization I can actually take that data
and map that out over a map of America using the charts right within Excel.
And you can see that loads up and gives me this beautiful visualization
that of course I can interact with the same way I do with any other chart within Excel as well.
So it's really a great way for me to re-visualize data in a better way.
It's great seeing all these updates to PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.
But, mail is another area where we've been applying intelligence to your work life
and really scheduling things and getting through all the mail that you receive on a daily basis.
What's new there?
Sure, so let's move over to the Outlook rich application.
One of the first things you'll notice is we have this new "Focused" and "Other" inbox.
This uses machine learning to assess the way I respond to email and read email.
It brings the things that are important to me to front, so I know what to process first.
The beauy is I can directly train the system on this as well.
So if I get a message that's important to me, I can easily right click that
and select to move that to "Focused" or to move that to "Other"
so I can de-prioritize or prioritize that email as I like.
Now one of the things with email is it's one of our primary modes of communication.
We're never sure if people are actually reading the messages we send.
So I have a message that I've sent out to some people on my team earlier today.
And with the infusion of my analytics right to the outlook client.
I can simply click the "My Analytics" tool
to see a new task pane that gives me an assessment of who's read that email.
I can see at this point, 40% of the people I've sent that email to have read that.
I can see how many people have replied,
forwarded, and how long it took them to get to that point of read.
Great thing is I can link right into my personal analytics to go and get deeper analysis
of how I'm spending my time throughout the day as well.
So really handy compared to some of the read receipt things we did before.
But, is this on by default?
Yeah, so this is part about E5 offering.
It really helps teems work better together
and it helps drive better culture in the way people are working as well.
There's a lot of updates really across the desktop that we've just seen.
But, let's switch gears for minutes because I know we've done a lot of work in terms of making the browser
also more customizable as we use Office 365.
Yes, you'll see as I'm come into the browser view here,
I get all the applications that I use frequently available right there on the homepage.
And as I scroll down I can see all of the recent documents I've been working on.
The OneDrive folders that I've been working in as well.
I've got all that information available to me the moment I login into the Office 365 portal.
We've also made it easy for people to customize their experience in the app launcher.
So as I come up into the app launcher here you'll notice that,
I have all of my apps laid out the way I like.
I can actually go in and change these as well.
If I decide that mail isn't something that I want to work on as frequently,
I can move that to a lower point in the app launcher.
Maybe I want to go and make the OneDrive icon a little bit bigger because that's something I look for a lot.
So I can go ahead and resize that to a wide icon
making it really easy for me to have all of those apps that I use day in and day out
available at the click of a button.
You can also see we have third-party applications pending to my app-launcher as well.
These can be ones that I've added or things that my administrator have added as well.
You can also see at the top I have my "Home".
I have new applications that my admin may have pushed out to me.
Or I can get a list of all the applications that are available in Office 365 right here in an easy to see manor.
One of my favorite features is actually the ability to search through your content right from the homepage.
Yes, we've actually taken the power of that "Tell Me" engine I was talking about before
and made it even easier for you to find features and functions within Office 365.
So for example if I want to create a calendar appointment,
You can see I can actually go in here and say: "Create Calendar".
And it actually returns "Compose Calendar".
Now the beauty is if I click on this link,
Outlook opens up and it also takes me straight to a new calendar appointment to create.
It's a really beautiful way for me to be able to get access to features within Office.
Also some of the features within Office 365 that we don't always play like,
Themeing my experience.
So if I decide to come back in to help here and type in "Theme",
You'll notice I get in that task pane their, the ability to access that themeing controls
right within Office 365 at the click of a button.
So really great tools to help me to be able to use those tools on the web,
and to help me be more productive.
A lot of great updates on the on the client app.
A lot on the browser that we can do in terms of customizing our experience.
You have a phone here, so why don't you tell us about all the updates on the phone?
Yeah, so we spend a lot of time on our devices.
Helping people to be more productive on the go is key.
You can see I have my Outlook application open.
I actually have this email that has come through about my flight to Prague from London.
As I click into the email, these are the types of emails we get day-in and day-out.
that are kind of hard to read because your detail is buried down in the text of the email.
With the new action card feature of the Outlook application,
I can see all that key information brought right to the top of the email.
You can see here that my flight to Prague has all the information
leaving from London, the time i'm leaving, and what time I'm landing in Prague.
And if I drill into that event,
you can see additional information about where i'm leaving from.
Of course, if I was close to the check-in date you can go and fire off the check-in process
right from within the application as well.
One of the other challenges when we're on the mobile device is how do we schedule appointments effectively?
So, I moved back to my calendar here.
You can first of all see that I have these beautiful icons that allow me to see at a glance
what's happening throughout my day.
But, I want to schedule an appointment with Alex.
I'm going to come in here and say that we're going to have a coffee.
I'm going to select Alex as my recipient.
You'll notice when I go to schedule a time,
I get the times that are available and not available highlighted in red for me.
So all I have to do to find the time that is suited for Alex and myself,
is to drag the appointment down until it turns green.
The beauty here is there's no more back and forth on
when is Alex available or when am I available.
I simply find that spot in his calendar quickly and easily from the mobile device.
It's really great seeing that on a phone.
I know that we've really looked at the desktop, the browser and the phone to help
optimize our productivity and really save a lot of time.
But, what's next?
So as you saw the power of the Cloud really helps to open up a ton of new immersive experiences
to help people create richer content and have better access to things they need on-the-go.
Not only from the perspective of leveraging the underlying service intelligence.
This also gives us intelligence and telemetry that we can use to improve the experience for people overall.
There's a lot more to come as we continuously innovate on features that will help you save time
So really a great lightning tour of all the new Office App experiences.
But, how can people at home try these today?
So, all the desktop features you saw today will be available as part
of your Office 365 Pro Plus subscription.
The browser features we saw will be available across all Office 365 versions.
With My Analytics really being key as part of E5.
You want to make sure you're on first release,
as many of these features will be coming to your tenant soon.
As a tech enthusiast, you can also stay ahead by subscribing to our insider program.
Thanks for joining us today, Ben.
Also keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for all the latest tech updates.
Goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics