Starting April 21, Microsoft’s Office 365 personal and family subscription suite will be renamed Microsoft 365 in a move that heralds an effort by the company to win over more consumer users.
It will include Office applications like Word and Excel as Office 365 has, but it comes with a promise of new apps and services both today and in the future. In a blog post describing the new service, Microsoft wrote that Microsoft 365 will offer “new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences.”
Later this year, it will also include Microsoft Teams for personal use, as distinct from the existing Slack-like communication tool for business.
Additionally, Microsoft 365 will include the just-announced Editor tool for Microsoft Word. Editor is essentially what it sounds like: an AI editor. It will make grammar suggestions, and Microsoft says it will also do things like offer gender-neutral alternatives to phrases that are written.
There are also new features in PowerPoint and Excel, such as the PowerPoint presentation coaching function. If the presenter has not faced the audience for a long time, or there are too many mood words such as ‘um’ in the speech, the application will remind about them. Excel adds tracking and new services for analyzing personal expenses. Users can import data from their own bank and checking accounts.
The most notable of those might be a change to Outlook that allows you to “link your personal calendar to your work calendar to show your real availability in your work account, while still maintaining privacy around the details of personal appointments and business meetings.”
Businesses may want to check out the new Microsoft 365 offerings for businesses. Furthermore, if you are already an Office 365 subscription user, then you can upgrade and migrate to the Microsoft 365 subscription plan for free.
If you have not migrated to SharePoint online, now is the right time to consider doing it. Contact us today to know more about our SharePoint online solution.
