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representatives). In this sense, Office
Planner feels unfinished.
Microsoft told us that it sees
Office Planner and Groups as the
avenues of private, intra-team
conversation, and Yammer as the
means to communicate hitting
milestones to the rest of the
company at large.
What worries us a bit, however,
is that Groups seems to assume
that one person equals one job. In a
large organisation, that may be true.
But some of the appeal of Groups is
the ability to form a Group as one
needs it. At a business employing 60
people, you could conceivably have
a number of groups with different
combinations of a handful of people,
but focused on different tasks.
Formalising numerous, different
interpersonal group relationships
with shared calendars, emails and
the like – and then trying to figure
out what to do with them as time
passes – well, it seems like it could
all become very complex, very
quickly. And that doesn’t even begin
to take into account permissions:
whether an engineer will need to be
granted the appropriate permissions
to see sales data, or if partners
can be invited in to assist with a
marketing campaign.
Sway
We’ve previously dubbed Sway one
of the first of a new generation of
‘blended apps’, lifting elements from
Word, PowerPoint, and more and
combining them in a way that feels
interesting and fresh. Sway allows
you to create a newsletter-esque
layout that emphasises graphics,
with photos used as backdrops and
transitions sliding in to introduce
new sections.
You create Sways in a layout or
‘storyline’ mode, where you embed
text, images, videos, tweets, and
charts in a card-based motif that’s
not altogether intuitive to someone
used to laying out images and text
in Word. It’s sort of a WYSIWYG
approach, as you can see the
changes applying themselves to
the ‘final’ document that’s visible
to the right on the screen. There’s
some noticeable lag, though,
and we’re not fans of the sliding
transitions between the preview
and storyline modes.
Fortunately, you don’t have to
think that much, as Sway itself
selects what it thinks might be a
good font or colour scheme, even
coordinating them to certain images.
You can even select ‘focus points’
for a given piece of art, though
we’re not sure what that does,
exactly. And if you don’t like it, you
click Remix, and Sway will select
a new font and design on the fly.
As someone who doesn’t have a
great eye for design, the additional
suggestions were welcome.
Sway starts out simply enough:
you pick a title and a backdrop
image. Embedding an image is as
easy as typing a search term in a
box, then letting Bing or PicSay
find a Creative Commons image for
you. But if you want a subhead, or
even a text box to put your name
on the report, there’s no obvious
way of doing so.
Sway is designed for the modern
Web, and sometimes it becomes a
bit pretentious in that regard. We
like Sway’s autosave feature – in
fact, you don’t save Sway with a
file name; it simply shows up as a
presentation in My Sways. But when
‘emphasise’ stands in for ‘bold face,’
and ‘accent’ for ‘italics’, it’s a bit
over the top. Loading the index and
individual Sways also takes several
seconds, and that’s annoying.
Sway seems geared at the
education market, but it lacks a
word-count feature – one metric
most teachers use. We’d also add a
legacy ‘print mode’ to allow students
to hand in a physical copy of a Sway.
Otherwise, Sway is a creative use of
Microsoft’s development efforts.
Increasingly minor apps
Sway may be one of Microsoft’s first
blended apps, but Publisher really
feels like a subset of Word, not
an app worth reserving for Office
365. Publisher’s territory is being
Behind the scenes, Sway uses a
card-based ‘Storyline” mode that
takes a bit of getting used to
encroached on, anyway. If you want
to produce a flyer or business cards,
Publisher’s your app. There’s even
a template for a baby photo album.
But you can see that all of these
products could be made in Word, or
via a web app or online service.
The Access database app is to
Excel as Publisher is to Word – a
corollary app that we’re sure some
people feel strongly about, yet
nobody seems to use. Case in point:
this unanswered Microsoft support
thread, asking about what’s new
in Access 2016 – with all of seven
people chiming in. Access has the
look and feel of the other Office
2016 apps, but that’s about all.
We’re sure there are a number
of people who can speak knowingly
about how databases are more
useful than a spreadsheet, but
Microsoft seems to have put all of its
effort into improving Excel. We were
also a little concerned about this
error message, which we discovered
on checking a Microsoft-authored
template for version information.
After all, isn’t the point of Office
2016 to use live, active content?
Office Mobile, web apps
Office 2016 has another problem:
the Office Mobile apps. Free,
ubiquitous and simple to use, it’s
often worth loading up the Excel,
OneNote, PowerPoint and Word
Mobile apps first, then dropping into
Office 2016 only if necessary. After
all, if your document is saved to
OneDrive, you can easily pull it up in
Word Mobile as well as Word 2016.
Granted, you’re not going to find
much of the nuance and complexity
62 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews February 2016