Microsoft Office 2016 for desktops set to arrive later this year

 

Whereas yesterday belonged to Windows 10, today is all about Office. Microsoft on Thursday revealed that the next iteration of its productivity suite for the desktop will be called Office 2016 and that it’ll remain the comprehensive experience that people are already familiar with.
 
The admission came buried inside a post about the new Office universal apps for Windows 10 that Microsoft touched on during yesterday’s event.
 
Not wanting to let too much out of the bag just yet, the post only revealed that Office 2016 will be best suited for a PC with a keyboard and mouse and that they have compelling new experiences coming as part of the new suite. The Redmond-based company said they’d have more on the subject in the coming months and that we can expect to see Office 2016 made available in the second half of this year.
 

 

Last September, alleged slides of Office 2016 leaked onto the web. What we saw was an Office with a much darker theme, reportedly one of the top requests in Office 2013. As you can see above, it does seem to be a bit easier on the eyes versus staring at a bright white screen for hours on end.
 
Office 2016 is also expected to feature the spiritual return of Clippy (Clippit), the animated paperclip assistant bundled with much earlier versions of Office. The new assistant is reportedly called “Tell Me.” It’s essentially a search field positioned at the top of documents to facilitate searching for questions regarding Office features.

 

It’s unclear if this will be a voice-controlled feature powered by Cortana or simply a standard search field.
 
~ Shawn Knight

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