Yes, that’s right, there’s a new version of Office.
[wow_colorme]If you have your Office through Office365, then you DON’T need Office2019 – you already have ALL the features, plus more![/wow_colorme]
If you have Office 2016, (or even an old version like 2010) then this is coming your way soon – in fact the beta (called ‘preview’) is available now and while the release date is unclear, we expect it to be this year. It’s available in both Mac and PC versions with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Project, Publisher and Visio.
Sadly, OneNote is no longer going to be part of Office – the desktop version is being axed in favour of the ‘app’ version – thankfully this has been improved substantially.
[header2 text=”So, what’s in Office 2019?” align=”left” color=”#336A40″ margintop=””] Unfortunately, the cloud-powered features like dictate and designer aren’t there – they use the Microsoft cloud to operate. But you do get text-to-speech, better inking features, and better tools for disability users.
There are new Excel functions and new PowerBI abilities. PowerPoint gets excellent ‘morph’ transition and better ink features. There’s a better zoom for moving slides within presentations.
Outlook gets the ‘@mention’ ability to include recipients from the message body text, and ‘focussed inbox’ to help you conquer email influxes.
So there are lots of incremental changes, but nothing earthshattering. The ‘premier’ Office edition now seems to be the 365 version available through subscription which does have some really useful features. Older versions like 2010 are starting to feel dated and limited. We suspect that, despite being a standalone version, the Office 2019 will be better than older editions of Office, at connecting to various future cloud services, including non-Microsoft ones.