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Microsoft rebrands Office 365 and introduces new Office-related features

By Cookie Monster - on 21 Apr 2020, 11:27am

Microsoft rebrands Office 365 and introduces new Office-related features

Note: This article was first published on 31 March 2020 and is republished now because Microsoft 365 launches today.

Office 365 will be rebranded as Microsoft 365 on 21 April. <br>Image source: Microsoft.

Microsoft just announced a rebranding of its Office 365 and several new features. Office 365 will be rebranded as Microsoft 365 on 21 April, and replaces the existing Office 365 Personal and Home subscription plans with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans at the same prices.

The company will roll out two new Microsoft 365 experiences in preview in the coming months - a new Microsoft Family Safety app, and new features in Microsoft Teams.

According to Microsoft, the Family Safety app is the only app that can manage screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox. It will also help familes stay connected with location sharing and notifications when a family member arrives or leaves home, school or work. There is even a driving report feature to help parents monitor first-time or inexperienced drivers in the household. The Family Safety app will be available on iOS and Android.

Microsoft Teams will be available in a new consumer version later this year with features to help consumers to connect, stay organised and collaborate with family and friends. Similar to the enterprise version, consumers can create groups to plan trips with friends, organise gatherings, make video calls, work together on shared to-do lists, assign tasks to specific people, and share files with each other.

There are also enhancements and new Office-related features in Microsoft 365. For example, the AI-powered Microsoft Editor will be accessible across Word and Outlook.com, and as a standalone browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Microsoft Editor offers ideas and suggestions to help consumers rephrase their sentences for more impact or clarity. It also has plagiarism-checking capabilites to help writers come up with original content and insert relevant citations when necessary with just a click.

PowerPoint's Presenter Coach feature is improved with two AI-powered features - monotone pitch and speech refinement. It will listen to the tone of voice and provide real-time feedback on adding some variation where needed. It will also provide grammer suggestions on how to better phrase the speech. PowerPoint Designer can now transform text into a beautiful timeline or auto generate several slide layouts. Microsoft 365 subscribers will have exclusive access to more than 8,000 photos and 175 looping videos from Getty images, 300 new fonts and 2,800 new icons across PowerPoint, Word and Excel.

Excel has a new personal finance management tool, Money which connects bank and credit accounts via Plaid. Transactions and account balances can be imported automatically with personalized insights on monthly spending. There will be proactive alerts about price changes for recurring payments, bank fees, overdraft warnings and more.

New data types are coming to Excel too. It helps consumers make sense of the data with over 100 topics covering food, movies, places, chemistry and even Pokémon. The new data types powered by Wolfram Alpha helps to gather, organise and analyse the information without the hassle of finding, copying and refreshing the data. 

Source: Microsoft

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