Check out the new updates to Microsoft 365 applications in April and May

Microsoft 365 contains a wide range of business productivity applications that are used on a daily basis by millions of users. With this array of applications, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s new for the suite and how users can make the most of them. April had several new features added with more coming up in May. In this blog we’ll cover some of highlights Microsoft 365 users can look forward to using.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is an integral part of Microsoft 365 and has become a major driver for organizations continuing with at-home working and hybrid environments. Polls have been a great addition to keep meeting attendees engaged. Polls have been updated to include external guest and mobile app users. The polls will soon also be expanded to include options for open-ended and multiple choice options. Poll creation and analysis is easier now as well. Suggestions when creating polls help to speed up the process while maintaining good quality, and poll insights are created after meetings to better examine the details.

Similar to these post-meeting poll insights is a general meeting recap feature. This recap will include details of attendees, including those who missed the meeting, a recording of the meeting, the chat messages, any files that were shared in the meeting, and a transcript. On that same note, live transcription of meetings has been added to help more users engage with their meetings.

Office applications

A few of the classic Office applications received some great new features as well. Microsoft Word now has the ability to automatically convert documents in PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft has been adding AI capabilities to many of its applications recently to speed up and make many processes easier for users. Now Word, and PowerPoint by extension, have received a similar treatment. This feature uses AI to create suggested PowerPoint slides from a Word document. It bases these slides on headers and other key images and words within the document. The slides can also be manually customized afterwards, but this helps to get the ball rolling.

On the topic of Word, the Track Changes features is a great way to see who made edits to collaborative documents. Now, this feature is in Excel as well. It is also found within the review tab, just like in Word. It will show who edited what cell, when it was edited, and the previous version of the cell in case it needs to be reverted.

The Outlook web app received a navigation update. It aims to make it easier for users to access the primary Outlook features and also quickly jump into the other Office applications. Toolbar on the left side now includes those Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in addition to the main features of contacts, inbox, and calendar.