Microsoft Office 2016 Preview: A first look

Microsoft’s latest Office  left private previews last month, with a public release of Office 2016. It is a brighter, more colourful Office, with a new colour-coded look-and-feel that reflects the Office applications icons in toolbars, sidebars, and surrounds. It is also more suited to today’s higher resolution displays, with improved high DPI support.

The switch to the Office 365 subscription service and its regular cycle of updates means that this is not a big bang Office release. Instead there is more a fine-tuning of the familiar Office apps, with more of a focus on integration with cloud-hosted Office servers and newer big data services based on Azure.

There is also more support for IT professionals struggling to control business information in a world where users see cloud-hosted file sharing as a critical business tool. With support for single sign-on services and  integrated policy-driven document encryption, Microsoft is making things easier for both users and administrators – giving admins more control, while simplifying user access to applications and services.