Microsoft Office 2016 Preview: A first look

People who already use OneDrive for Business can now use Excel’s read only view to quickly open spreadsheets to check data and results without changing the contents, making it easier to share information with teams and across a business.

Excel 2016 also picks up tools for working with and for sharing big data. The Power Query add-on is now a part of Excel, making it easier to work with Azure-hosted Hadoop data. Business intelligence is becoming increasingly important to business, and Excel has become the front-end for Microsoft’s BI tooling. Now that Power BI is a free service, embedding what had previously been add-ons into Excel 2016 makes a lot of sense – as it is where users will be managing data and designing their queries.