MS Office 2016 : New Member With Impressive Features

A new member of the Office family is a cloud-based presentation app called Sway, freely downloadable even if you don't have the rest of Office. Sway creates presentations that are digital equivalents of the long roll of paper that Jack Kerouac used for typing On the Road in www.office.com/setup : You read a Sway by scrolling through it up and down or right and left in a Web browser—it's most at home in Windows 10's new Edge browser—pausing here and there to click on slideshows or similarly animated or expandable features. Your Sways are housed on Microsoft's servers, so you probably won't use them for sensitive data.

Except for the fact that Office is Microsoft's main content-creation platform, there's no special reason why Sway should be part of Office, and it doesn't share data or anything else with any other Office app. When you create a Sway, you can amuse yourself for hours with the Remix! button on the toolbar that reorganizes your presentation into entirely new layouts and designs each time you click it. The users who read your Sways may find them slightly annoying, as I did, because the built-in animations and transitions slow down your access to content. Microsoft has a habit of making second versions that are far better than the first, and Sway is worth keeping an eye on even if you don't use it now.

Throughout www.office.com/setup , you'll find ancient geological layers of features that haven't been improved in years because too few people use them. Word's Master Documents is a potentially powerful feature that lets you edit chapters as separate files, yet also combine them in a master document that imports the separate chapters when you open it and exports them again when you close it. This feature is dauntingly complicated, and produces files that tend to get corrupted, so the word among Office veterans is that you simply shouldn't use it. However, an improved and updated version would be right at home in Microsoft's new collaboration features, and maybe Microsoft will give it another look for a future version.