Hand gesture support in Office 365 is closer than you think
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Before releasing any new Office features, Microsoft always tests out its preview builds with a select number of users that are part of the Office Insider program.
They are divided into several release rings, with the Fast Ring being the one that gets the newest builds, but also the ones with the most bugs.
Meanwhile, those in the Slow rings are the last to test out the preview builds, but by the time it reaches them all bugs and issues will have been weeded out.
It seems that Microsoft has released a new preview build, and those that are part of the Office Insider program have released a few hints of the upcoming changes for three major Microsoft Office components:
Word and Outlook receive quality-of-life features
Microsoft Word
The highlight in the case of Microsoft Word is a new feature that enables hand gestures:
We’ve brought all your tools together in a toolbox, including the intelligent pen, allowing you to make edit your text with ink gestures. Additionally, your highlighter now snaps to text directly.
This feature is aimed towards those with touch-enabled devices, and you can use it to:
- Use a gesture to delete words, selected words, or insert words into a sentence
- Add a line
- Join two words or split a word
- Highlight words
Outlook
The newest feature in Microsoft Outlook is the ability to detect wifi connections that required web-page-based sign-ins. This makes it now easier to join a wifi network that requires a web page interaction to gain full network access
Additionally, a Twitter post revealed that Microsoft is working on a new feature called Outlook Spaces for Outlook on the Web. This new feature will help you organize your emails, meetings, and documents into one clean space.
As you can see in the video below, it looks like a complete overhaul of the way you organize your data in Outlook:
As of now, the feature is only available for Office 365 users, though, and it won’t be available for those with Office 365 Personal or Home subscriptions.
Bug fixes
This latest Office Insider build also comes with some bug fixes that solve some of the most common issues for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.
What do you think about these exciting new features brought to Word and Outlook? Let us know what you think by leaving a message in the comments section below.
