Microsoft continues to polish its products. Soon we will probably be introduced to a new start menu in Windows 10 and now it appears that Microsoft is also planning to give the Office 365 apps a new look. You can expect this.
In a blog post Jon Friedman, who as CEO is responsible for the design of Microsoft Office, provides insight into the future of Office.
According to Friedman, we are on the eve of a new “design philosophy” for Office, in which Microsoft wants to continuously improve office software and respond to the current developments surrounding the corona crisis, so that people work from home more often.
Get rid of the colors
Microsoft wants Office apps to become more streamlined and visual frills disappear. Friedman shared some images of the new look and what is striking is that the colors no longer play a large role in the apps, while you now see blue, red and green colors when you start Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The Office apps are therefore a lot less colorful.
If you scroll up in a document, you will see a simple search bar with which you can search through all your Office 365 documents. The ribbon at the top of your documents, where you will find all the editing options, will also become more streamlined, and you will find only the most important functions you need to edit your document.
Microsoft is also tinkering with the back of the Office apps and the power of artificial intelligence in particular must be brought to the fore. Microsoft wants to make smart use of this technology, making it easier for you to discover and correct spelling errors in Word, to implement tasks more efficiently within Microsoft Planner or to remove calculation errors from your formulas in Excel. The errors are all collected in a separate menu, so you can fix them in an instant.
Link with Teams
Microsoft sees that users also use many Teams in combination with the Office tools due to the corona crisis. As a result, the company wants to make it easier to collaborate with your colleagues within Teams and the Office apps. Friedman did not reveal specific details about this.
Microsoft also wants to increase the security of Office documents by giving the owner of a file more options to indicate with whom they want to share a document and whether they can only view or edit that document.
Microsoft didn’t say when we’ll see the first tweaks in Office, but the process is likely to be gradual over the next few years.
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