Download Microsoft Office 2016 Public Preview For Windows

Microsoft has released its next-gen Office 2016 suite as a public preview. Office 2016 is promising a bunch of new changes and is on the road to bring new features to a wider audience so that the software giant can polish their software even further before pushing the button for the final consumer release.

While Microsoft continues to make changes and adjustments to the new Office apps, the company had released some of them on the Windows 10 Technical Preview as well and made them available as the IT Pro and Developer Preview. Microsoft has admitted that while the company makes some serious across-the-board changes to its approach to the software business, Office itself remains central to the company’s strategy.

“Today we’re expanding the Office 2016 Preview, making it available to Office users everywhere in preparation for general availability in Fall 2015,” said Jared Spataro, General Manager for the Office marketing team. Given Spataro’s comments, users should be expecting the productive suit of apps to be hitting their PCs some time in Q4 of 2015 this year. However, the biggest question that remains, is what makes this new Office different from the ones preceding it.

We’ve known for a while about the more publicized and talked about features of Office 2016 which happens to be cloud access for creating documents but extended to editing and creation on the cloud server as well. For now, consumers are able to simply save their Office documents to OneDrive. Microsoft is also pitching in with some Google styled real-time co-authoring as well which is the one feature that will really help Office 2016 gain more traction in a market that is budding with near-similar free apps.

Other new additions to the suite are a bunch of smart features that tend to adapt to users’ patterns over time. A new ‘Tell Me’ feature for example, let’s you simply type in what you want to do and it will be done. It will be interesting to see just how much this feature can accomplish given its relatively open-ended command acceptance. ‘Clutter’ smartly studies your emailing patterns and will keep your mailbox organized and free of, well, clutter. ‘Insights’ is a Bing powered contextual search feature that will allow users to search and add information to their document without having to leave it.

You can download the Office 2016 Preview from here.

Top Mobile Apps for Taking Notes [iOS,Android,Windows Phone]

Our smartphones make for great note-taking companions. They can be used to jot down ideas, save pictures, find information and pretty much everything you want with the help of intuitive apps and features. They are a boon to students, researchers and the casual users alike.

There are many mobile apps available for notes creation. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses. We take a look at some of the very best of them, ensuring that you don’t have to rely on the traditional paper-based notepads (except for doodling maybe).

Evernote

The grand-daddy of note taking apps, Evernote is fast and simple. But its biggest selling point is that it syncs your notes across all devices and all manner of mobile OSes. Be it Android, iOS, Windows Phone or BlackBerry, your notes are there for you, with all manner of picture and multimedia snippets included. The Web Clipper extension makes saving whole web pages or part of them a snappy process.

And did I mention that it works with desktop PCs and Macs as well? Everything from clipped web articles, notes, pictures and more are displayed exactly as you left them in your notes.

Platforms: All major mobile OS and desktop OS

Price: Free / Premium versions with Offline access to notes.

Google Keep

If you want dead simplicity when it comes to taking notes, its hard to beat Google’s material design inspired Keep. This app does notes and reminders too, syncing with your Chrome web browser to deliver desktop notifications to you.

Google Keep is aesthetically beautiful and it also is the most easiest to use. It may seem a bit barebones with its simple user interface but when it comes to the bare essentials, Google Keep is more than up to the task. It emphasizes the quickness of taking a note, making lists and snapping photos to include with notes. All notes are synced with your Google account. It also features alarm function with the reminder feature to keep you apprised of things.

Platforms: Android / Web / Windows Phone & iOS (Unofficial Clients)

Price: Free

Notability

Looking for a notes app that includes unique features not found on other apps? Notability for iOS gives you the means to incorporate videos in your notes as well as sketching features. This in addition to all the default note-taking capabilities found in other apps.

Notability also offers a audio recording feature as you’re taking down a note. This is helpful when you’re interviewing someone or just thinking out loud whilst you type the note.

Platform : iOS

Price: Rs 303 (based on exchange rate)

Honorable Mentions

Simplenote: A bare-bones note taking app that does one thing and does it right. Text-based note taking. It features syncing across Android, iOS and web app versions. Free.

Penultimate: For those who love using their iPad Stylus to take down notes and scribbles, Penultimate is the answer to their requirements. You can do everything from diagrams to handwritten notes with your stylus, letting you categorise your notes for easier manageability. Free.

There’s so many more apps for taking notes. What is your favorite go-to app for jotting down notes and reminders? Sound off below.

Office 2016 and Office Universal Apps for Windows 10 to Deliver This Year

During Microsoft's recent Windows 10 ultimate reveal (my term, coined in a recent Short Takes), we saw tidbits of the next Universal Office in demos of upcoming products launching as part of the Windows 10 wave. The demos highlighted what we've all been waiting for, touch-first Office applications. Office for Windows 10, as Microsoft is calling it, will bring a touch-optimized experience of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook to small screens. For phones and tablets running Windows 10, the new Office apps will come pre-installed. If you want a good first look for touch-heavy apps, Microsoft will deliver them as part of a new Windows 10 Technical Preview build in a few weeks. If you're not part of the Windows Insider program yet, this is a good reason to join now.

Additionally, and despite it releasing in the 2015 calendar year, the next version of Microsoft's desktop productivity suite will be titled Office 2016. Office 2016 is the update to Office 2013 and will continue to deliver an optimized experience for mouse and keyboard users. Reports suggest that this version of the next Office is already in limited testing by unnamed customers.

I'm providing some screenshots of Office for Windows 10 below and I think it's important to highlight something for the keen eye. The UI is very similar to what Microsoft has built into the apps for iPad and Android tablets already, and may seem additionally familiar toWindows 8.1 users – particularly the next version of Outlook. This version of Outlook looks strikingly similar to the Mail app that comes pre-installed with Windows 8.1, which is decidedly not the best design, suffers from lack of robust functionality, and is often times severely quirky. But, I'm sure Microsoft has already taken those flaws under consideration.

Outlook for Windows 10

Word for Windows 10

Excel for Windows 10

PowerPoint for Windows 10

OneNote for Windows 10

To get a deeper look before the preview is available, join the Office Mechanics in a 7 minute tour…

Dropbox releases app for Windows Phone

Late last year Dropbox announced that they had entered into a partnership with Microsoft. When this partnership was announced, the first benefit that it brought to consumers was Dropbox integration in Microsoft Office. This allowed users to choose between using Dropbox or Skydrive as a medium for storing all of their documents in the cloud.

Today Dropbox announced the next step in this partnership with the launch of an official Dropbox application for Windows Phone. This completes support for Dropbox on devices in the Microsoft ecosystem, with a Modern UI application for Windows PCs and tablets having been available since the beginning of 2013. It has definitely taken a while for it to move to mobile, but it's good to see another developer making apps for Windows Phone. The app is available for any users running Windows Phone 8.0 and above, and includes all the features you'd expect from Dropbox, as well as some Windows specific abilities like pinning Dropbox folders as Start Screen tiles.

Source: Dropbox