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not a pane. And, of course, it
would be nice if the feature were
ubiquitous across Office. But with
markup, live collaboration, and
OneNote linking, Office 2016 should
make it easier to recall earlier
meetings that have blurred together.
This is how realtime
collaboration
is supposed to work:
colleagues edit
your documents
on the fly, with
small flags to show
who’s doing what
in his or her Microsoft password.
(Otherwise, you’ll need a Microsoft
account to authenticate yourself.)
As long as all parties have Office
2010 or later versions, real-time
editing can take place: invited
guests can add, edit, or delete
content in a sort of collaborative
free-for-all. That can be managed,
however, by some fine-grained
editing restrictions, such as locking
format changes, restricting a user
to making only tracked changes,
or by blocking him or her entirely
(while letting other users make
free, unrestricted edits). You can
attach a comment to the document
itself, or to a specific location in the
text (which then shows up as an
icon). You can also manually save
whenever you’d like to create a
version history that helps organise
the document further. Even if
you’re offline, you can still monitor
progress using Track Changes.
With PowerPoint, however, most
of that goes out the window. You
can ask coworkers to collaborate,
and you can still send them links
by which they can edit your
shared presentations. You can still
comment, and coworkers can still
make changes to the text as they
wish. But you can’t really manage
their changes, or restrict what they
can or can’t do. (You can compare
and reconcile versions of the same
document that a coworker has
worked upon separately, however,
which is vaguely similar.)
But – and this is a big but – any
revisions to a document show up
only if you click a tiny Save icon, way
down at the bottom of the screen,
that serves as a sort of CB-radiostyle
‘Over’ command. It’s almost
impossible to find unless you know
what you’re looking for. Click it, and
changes made by others show up.
When your colleague makes another
change, you have to click it again.
Granted, collaborative editing
wasn’t in the Office 2016 preview
Microsoft released earlier this year.
And, given that there’s an enormous
blank space in the ribbon header
to the right half of the screen, you
have to imagine that more managed
sharing is heading to PowerPoint.
(Microsoft tells me it is, shortly.)
OneNote
Here’s the news on OneNote: linked
OneNote notes. The feature’s
actually been around since Office
2013, but it seems to be more
prominently displayed under the
Review tab of apps like Word.
A linked OneNote note can be
a bit confusing. In a OneNote note,
you can add a hypertext link to a
web page that allows you to jump
directly to that site. But what a
linked OneNote note does is create
a separate window pane that
allows you to reference another
document or web page as you’re
reviewing your notes.
In some sense, this duplicates
your working environment. Imagine
your boss discussing a proposal.
With Linked Notes, you can open
that document, link it to a note, then
begin typing commentary. When
you review those notes, OneNote
knows that you were referring to
the Word document and can bring
it up. If your boss then moved on to
a PowerPoint document, you can
link that too: moving your focus as
your boss shifts gears. (Excel isn’t
supported, yet.)
OneNote linking doesn’t allow
you to highlight a word or page of a
document. It links to the document,
which opens in a separate window,
Outlook
Normally, Outlook would seem to
pale compared to the leading lights
of Office. At one time, email was
both the medium and the metaphor
for managing business relationships.
Now, however, modern social
networks threaten that model – and
Microsoft has no answer to that.
Nevertheless, Outlook remains the
connective tissue for many of the
Office apps, and now it’s the hub of
Microsoft’s collaborative vision.
Microsoft has added a number
of small conveniences to Outlook
2016. For one thing, if you want
to add an attachment, Outlook
pulls down a list of recently used
and modified files across all of the
Office applications. If you want to
email an enormous file (say, 700MB)
Outlook will email a link to the file
stored in OneDrive, rather than
clogging your network and mail
folders by emailing the file itself.
Microsoft also added a more
important addition, Clutter, a
sort of second-level spam folder.
Clutter, which has been available
on the Outlook.com web app for
months, takes work email it deems
unnecessary (notices for a fun
run; ‘doughnuts in the break room’
and the like) and puts them in a
dedicated Clutter folder.
Clutter isn’t perfect: it tries to
determine what you want to save
and what’s irrelevant, but you’ll tend
to find some email you’d want to
read in the Clutter folder. (You can
turn it off entirely if you so choose.)
The flagship feature of Outlook
2016 is a new Groups feature, which
carves out a portion of Outlook
– and Office, to a lesser extent
– into a series of small, flexible
teams that you or a colleague
can create. Instead of exchanging
emails, the dynamic here is more
conversational. But that’s not all:
Groups interacts with a web app that
Microsoft calls the Planning Hub
(sort of an online version of Trello)
as well as its new app for surfacing
enterprise content, Delve. So it
probably makes the most sense to
view them as a cohesive whole.
60 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews February 2016