Tag: Recent News

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Introducing the Office app for Windows 10

Last year, we updated Office.com with a new experience focused on two simple things: helping users get the most out of Office and getting them back into their work quickly. The streamlined site has clearly resonated with customers, and now more than 40 percent of Office 365 web users start their work by visiting Office.com.

Starting today, we’re bringing this experience to Windows 10 in the form of an app, simply called Office. It’s now available to Windows Insiders (Fast) and will roll out to all Windows 10 users soon. The app itself is free and it can be used with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, or Office Online—the free web-based version of Office for consumers.

A few key reasons to use the app include:

  • Quickly switch between apps. See all your Office apps in one place and switch between them with a single click.
  • Get back into your work. Jump to your most recently used documents, pinned documents, and documents shared with you—whether they’re on your local machine or stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.
  • Find what you need. With Microsoft Search integrated prominently, you can quickly find the apps, documents, people, and sites you need to get your work done.
  • Tailor it to your organization. Organizations can apply company branding and integrate other line of business applications through single sign-on to customize the experience for their users.

Image of a laptop open showing the new Office app on its screen.

The Office app will replace the My Office app, which currently helps users manage their Office 365 subscriptions. If you already have the My Office app, you will get the new Office app through an automatic update in the coming months. Otherwise, you can download it from the Microsoft Store. Starting this summer, new Windows 10 devices will come with the Office app already installed—making it easier than ever to start using Office on a new PC.

Let us know what you think

We are excited to share this initial release with the Windows Insiders, and we’ll continue to improve the experience based on your feedback. Please let us know what you think via the feedback link under Settings within the app.

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A wonderful gift from a Christmas Eve space voyage: Humanity’s first view of itself

In this edition of Today in Technology, Microsoft President Brad Smith and Communications Director Carol Ann Browne take a look back at Christmas Eve 1968, when three American astronauts showed the world the best of technology as they rode a rocket into space and gave the world its first glimpse back at planet Earth. It was an important moment, not just for people but for the history of technology.

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343 Industries collaborates with Limbitless Solutions to offer Halo-themed ‘Bionic Arm’ prosthetics to deserving young heroes

One of our core missions here at the studio is to “inspire heroes and deliver wonder.” Normally, this is most often and understandably applied to the nature of making games. Indeed, creating new worlds to explore, new mysteries to solve, and heroes through which to experience it all is always an amazing and rewarding endeavor. There are, however, times where opportunities to inspire heroes and deliver wonder present themselves outside the scope of game code, cutscene scripts, or sandbox balancing.

Today we’re excited to talk a little bit about one such opportunity, as 343 Industries is proud to announce a collaboration with Limbitless Solutions to provide new Halo-themed, 3D-printed prosthetics to be made available to young heroes who – like the Master Chief himself – also routinely and triumphantly beat the odds.

Limbitless Solutions is a non-profit organization that creates an affordable option for prosthetic-limb devices for children. Using rapid prototyping technologies ‑ 3D printing specifically ‑ prosthetic arms that are fully functional and capable of gripping objects and various gestures are created and fitted to children at a fraction of the cost compared to other prosthetics on the market. The incredible and dedicated team over at Limbitless began in 2014 as a group of University of Central Florida students who wanted to help a family whose son was born without most of his right arm, and since Limbitless has grown to a full-time operation based at UCF in Orlando, Fla. 

The Limbitless “Bionic Arm” prosthetics are all at once functional, cost-effective, and expressive, and perhaps best of all, Limbitless donates their innovative prosthetic arms completely free of charge to recipients and their families. Limbitless is “devoted to building a generation of innovators who use their skills and passion to improve the world around them.” To learn more about their program and also see and hear inspiring stories of affiliated families, please make sure to visit Limbitless-Solutions.org.

THE HALO CONNECTION

With all that firmly in mind, we’re incredibly honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with Limbitless Solutions to offer a unique bit of Halo flavor in our shared goal of inspiring heroes. Beginning in 2019, Limbitless will add two special Halo-themed options to their already-amazing lineup of designs for their 3D-printed Bionic Arms. First up is a fantastic recreation of the Master Chief’s own legendary Mk. VI armor, designed to help turn any eager recipient into an awesomely augmented, galaxy-saving superhero.

In addition, Limbitless will also offer a “multiplayer” variant of the Mjolnir-inspired and personalized prosthetic, allowing a wide range of creative color customization to create a Spartan style as unique and heroic as the recipients themselves. We’re infinitely honored to have been approached Limbitless Solutions to help further their ongoing mission to make heroes out of humanity and look forward to delivering hope and helping hands beginning early next year.

Again, for more information on Limbitless Solutions and their innovative and empowering projects, please make sure to visit Limbitless-Solutions.org on the web, or on Twitter at @Limbitless3D. You can also learn more about their amazing studio and team by checking out their YouTube channel. For all the latest Halo news and updates, keep dialed into Halo Waypoint on the web, as well as @Halo on Twitter.

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ZestFinance and Microsoft team up to make explainable AI widely available for lenders

Banks and lenders that want to put more profitable ML models to work no longer have to be held back by concerns over ML’s lack of transparency. Today, ZestFinance announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to deploy Zest’s machine learning (ML) software tools directly on Microsoft Azure and Machine Learning Server platforms to deliver the first fully explainable AI for highly regulated industries, starting with the financial sector.

Continue reading ZestFinance and Microsoft team up to make explainable AI widely available for lenders

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How 50 classrooms used Skype to help save a school in Kenya

Ben Honeycutt is the Executive Director of non-profit Open World Cause and a Social Studies Teacher at Woodland Park Middle School in Colorado. As an educator, Ben’s mission is to provide his students with real world opportunities, so they can learn more about the world around them and take action to make a difference. One of their latest achievements was to help fund the construction of a school in Kenya. We met with Ben to learn all about this amazing, life-changing learning experience:

It all started with a Skype call

In June of 2015, we had a Skype call with Livingstone Kegode, the director of HIPAfrica, and were so impressed with his work that we were committed from the moment the call was over. A little over a year later, Livingstone informed us that the country of Kenya had changed its zoning standards for schools, and unless HIPAfrica could raise over $14,000 for three new classrooms, a new washroom, and new fencing, HIP would have to close its doors to the 59 children who attended its school.

We traveled out to Kimilili to survey HIP and the surrounding community in May of 2017. We surveyed that over half of the students would no longer be able to attend a school if HIP closed down. Additionally, we observed that 10 of the students had descended stomachs on Monday morning, and teachers had guessed that up to 15 of them received their only meals at the school.

The structures the school were using were deteriorating, as they were using semi-permanent structures for their classrooms. We found through conversations with a local architect that the bathrooms were about to collapse. It was at a point where it was creating unsanitary conditions for the entire student body.

HIP’s administration was completely committed to doing all they could to help their students. We were inspired to not only help lead a campaign to save HIP, but to look into providing sustainable clean water, nutrition, and educational programs to ensure that HIP’s students were receiving the best long-term education possible.

At the time, when we found out about the challenges facing HIP in 2016, I couldn’t conceive how to start a successful initiative to help solve this problem. Instead, I focused on what I could do on a micro level to start helping from my classroom. Two of my middle school students, named Amelia and Christina, came up with an idea to start a project called “Kenya Help?” where they collected shoes on behalf of an organization called Funds2orgs – “Kenya Help?” collected over 1,000 pairs of shoes and in exchange received over $1,000 toward HIP for their efforts.

It was after seeing my students go above and beyond that I started wondering about how this movement could go from my classroom to classrooms around the world. I designed and published a Collaboration on Skype in the Classroom’s website, calling for classrooms all around the world to join. In six months, over 50 classrooms from around the world got together and helped raise $8,000 for HIP, helping us collect a total of over $16,000 to fund the construction of three new classrooms, a washroom with hand-washing and sanitizing stations, and fencing. All this allowed HIP’s students to continue their education.

The new washrooms

After this experience, I would encourage every educator to start their own global projects and give their students real world issues to solve. Take the leap and don’t look back!

I was inspired early on from Dr. Neil Gershenfeld’s 2005 work, FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. Gershenfeld talked about how students have the potential to create “laboratories of learning” when they have ownership of their projects. Gershenfeld articulated that when students have this ownership, they often go above and beyond their outlined expectations. It’s 13 years later, and I believe Skype in the Classroom can be a platform for what Dr. Gershenfeld was advocating. In the “Day in the Life” project, when middle school students had the agency that Dr. Gershenfeld advocated, they soared past the outlined goals and propelled each other to do something as impactful as saving a school in Kenya.

With resources like Skype in the Classroom and the tools that universities provide, teachers can have their students not only start incredible real-world projects that they will remember for the rest of their lives, but also ones that make a real impact around the world. I’ve seen students go on to use technology to help people, start businesses, and take a classroom project and turn it into a worldwide campaign. Students today have the power to change the world from the screens of their devices – what’s stopping them?

Contact me through the Microsoft Educator Community to learn how your class can help teachers and schools in Nepal and Kenya today!

P.S. I’d like to thank our partners Jacqueline Jumbe-Kuhara, Fredrick Manzugu, Livingstone Kegode, Michael Soskil, Eric Crouch, Garrett Wilkinson, Sue Levine, Dr. Joe O’Brien, Professor Melissa Collum, Professors Beth and Jeremy Gulley, and acknowledge the works of Dr. Eric Hartman, Dr. Neil Gershenfeld, Dr. Paul Farmer as well as our many supporters who make our work possible.

Teachers: Explore all the available Skype Collaborations to connect your students with classrooms around the world to work on projects, explore different cultures, and build greater compassion and empathy for one another. You can also create your own Skype Collaboration—learn more by taking the Skype collaboration course.

Click here for free STEM resourcesClick here for free STEM resourcesClick here for free STEM resourcesClick here for free STEM resources

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‘State of Decay 2’ soundtrack now available on vinyl

As 4 million players have been writing their own survival story in State of Decay 2, they’ve been enjoying BAFTA award-winning and Billboard / MTV VMA nominated Danish composer’s Jesper Kyd soundtrack, which is available on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon. Starting today, for fans who want to experience Jesper’s soundtrack full of hope for survival and a better tomorrow in full, they can purchase the State of Decay 2 Special Edition – Double Vinyl for $39.99. In addition to the atmospheric guitar and analog synth score as heard in the game, the double vinyl also includes ten previously unreleased tracks.

To celebrate today’s release, we caught up with Jesper to ask him some questions gathered from the State of Decay 2 player community for a deeper look at the soundtrack.

Xbox Wire: Did you play a lot of State of Decay: YOSE?

Jesper Kyd: Yes, I did play a lot of State of Decay and YOSE and it really influenced the way I wrote the score for SOD2. It reaffirmed that exploration music is very important to setting the atmosphere of the game, especially between missions.

Xbox Wire: Do you plan to play State of Decay 2?

Jesper Kyd: Yes, when I can find the time I plan to play through the game to the end.

Xbox Wire: Did you record any live musicians for the score?

Jesper Kyd: We recorded a ton of live instruments for the score such as dobro guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitars, live percussion of all sorts, solo violin, solo cello. The live instruments are an important part of making the world of State of Decay breathe and come alive. The broken down post-apocalyptic world we play through needs to be reinforced with the feel of rural Americana, we’re in the American heartland and live instruments is critical to accomplishing an authentic vibe.

Xbox Wire: What instruments did you use?  -What is your favorite?

Jesper Kyd: My favorite instrument is probably the dobro or steel guitar. It adds such a warm and atmospheric feel to the score, especially on tracks such as “Hills of my Hometown”. I also really like the fiddle, especially when it’s playing chords across the neck. Gives it a folky feel set on a country hillside vista.

Xbox Wire: How long does it take you to write a piece of music?

Jesper Kyd: It really depends on the length of the track and purpose of the music. Exploration tracks are usually the most challenging since you don’t have a clear idea of what the music needs to do at all times. Gameplay specific music is easier since the purpose is clear and established: tension moments often need tension music, suspenseful moments needs suspense, and so on. For these tracks the challenge then becomes to write something that feels fresh and surprising.

Xbox Wire: What was different about this score compared to the first game?

Jesper Kyd: Firstly, there’s a lot more music! I worked on the project for about 2 years, writing over 3 hours of music, some 105 cues in all. Also, I tried to bring out more of the human emotion of the situation you are experiencing. We wanted the music to help make the experience feel hopeful as you try to rebuild and expand your community.

Xbox Wire: What inspired you? 

Jesper Kyd: I was inspired by the game’s setting, themes of survival and hope for the community.

Xbox Wire: Did you have any influences?

Jesper Kyd: I rarely listen to other music when writing scores and I was careful not to listen to any relevant music. You don’t want a theme you are writing to sound similar to something you might be listening to. So my main influence was the game’s rural environment and post-apocalyptic story setting. The score is infused with rustic elements from the landscape in decay and so a lot of the recordings were processed with vintage gear.

Xbox Wire: If you weren’t doing this what would you be doing?

Jesper Kyd: I always wanted to become a film maker. If I wasn’t writing music I still think I would be creating stories and experiences in different ways, perhaps as a film maker.

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343 Industries’ Bonnie Ross to be inducted into AIAS Hall of Fame

Today, we are happy to share that the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) has announced its 23rd Hall of Fame recipient: Bonnie Ross, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Head of 343 Industries. Ross has been integral in the vision and expansion of the Halo franchise that has continued to excite generations of fans, generating nearly $6 billion in worldwide sales to date and has transcended video games to grow into a global entertainment phenomenon. Ross is also a key voice in promoting STEM and diversity efforts across the gaming industry amongst women, under-represented minorities and children.

“It is thanks to Bonnie’s vision and drive for combining art and technology that has allowed the Halo universe to flourish within so many different mediums and platforms,” said Meggan Scavio, President, Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. “That along with her deep passion to expand diversity in gaming and encourage STEM education amongst women as well as all young people is truly inspirational. Her positive legacy and leadership have helped advance interactive entertainment and will impact game makers and aspiring game makers for generations to come.”

The 2019 Hall of Fame Award will be presented to Ross during the 22nd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards ceremony on Wednesday, February 13, 2019, at the Aria Convention Center in Las Vegas by her long-time colleague and friend, Phil Spencer, Executive Vice President and Head of Gaming at Microsoft.

“It’s been a privilege to work alongside Bonnie for more than two decades, and I have continually been impressed not only by her passion for merging art and storytelling, but also her equal passion for creating teams and technical breakthroughs; solid foundations that will set the direction of Halo and Xbox for years to come,” said Spencer. “Bonnie’s tenure at Microsoft is more than just a model for aspiring game makers, it’s a proof of concept that bringing together talented and diverse voices around a shared, passionate vision, can unleash worlds, wonders, and legends that define entertainment for generations.”

Ross’ interest in technology and gaming began at an early age, where her pursuit of advanced math and science classes led to a degree in Technical Communication and a concentration in Physics and Computer Science. Following college, she landed an internship at IBM before beginning her profession at Microsoft, first working on operating systems.

Ross began her career in the games industry in 1994, when Microsoft created a PC sports gaming division, leading to her first game release of NBA Full Court Press for Windows. She progressed her career in gaming in a variety of roles, including producer, lead producer, executive producer, and general manager overseeing production for all titles within the Microsoft Game Studios portfolio. In these roles, Ross worked with several leading development studios in the co-development or publishing of many well-known titles, including Counter-Strike (Xbox), Dungeon Siege, Fuzion Frenzy, Gears of War, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, NBA: Inside Drive, Pandora’s Box, Psychonauts, and Zoo Tycoon.

In 2007, when Halo creators Bungie parted ways with Microsoft as a first-party developer, Ross founded 343 Industries, an entertainment studio committed to fostering the growth and expansion of the Halo franchise, as well as driving innovation across Microsoft platforms. That commitment to building diverse stories and characters has helped 343 Industries create immersive, blockbuster sci-fi entertainment experiences within the Halo universe. At Microsoft Game Studios and 343 Industries, she has worked with or directly overseen many well-loved Halo games: Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo: Spartan Assault, Halo: Spartan Strike, Halo 4, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Halo 5: Guardians, Halo Wars 2, Halo: Fireteam Raven, and the upcoming Halo Infinite.

Ross is passionate about bringing together art and technology to transform how people experience entertainment. Over the last nine years, she pushed to broaden franchise reach and define Halo as a leader in transmedia across the entire entertainment industry, including the Halo series of video games, the upcoming Halo television series by SHOWTIME, and live-action series, such as Halo: Forward Unto Dawn and Halo: Nightfall. In addition, 12 of 17 Halo novels have been named to the New York Times Best Sellers list and Halo consumer products have generated over $1.5 billion in consumer spend.

Ross is also deeply involved in promoting efforts to drive diversity across the games industry and generating interest amongst women, minorities, and children in the pursuit of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. In 1997, she co-founded the Microsoft Women in Gaming community as a way for women in the industry to network and support each other. Beginning as a small cocktail event with roughly 20 attendees, it has since then grown to become an annual lunch at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) that counts more than 1,500 in attendance.

Ross was named one of Fortune’s most powerful women in gaming and is a key part of The Ad Council’s “She Can STEM” campaign.

The AIAS Hall of Fame honor is bestowed on game creators who have been instrumental in the development of highly influential games and moving a particular genre forward. These individuals demonstrate the highest level of creativity and innovation, resulting in significant product influence on a scale that expands the scope of the industry. Past AIAS Hall of Fame recipients include: Hideo Kojima (2016), Leslie Benzies (2014), Dan and Sam Houser (2014), and Todd Howard (2017),

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Ready for business: Lenovo ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga

Updates to the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga are designed to keep users and IT departments happy through proven reliability and comprehensive ThinkShield device security—without sacrificing performance. The ThinkPad portfolio has always offered a broad range of choices to give customers the specific device they need. The updated ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga are no different.

Key features include:

  • The latest 8th Gen Intel® Core™ processors.
  • 13.3-inch FHD displays with Touch option and garaged Active Pen on L390 Yoga.
  • ThinkShield security features including dTPM 2.0, touch fingerprint reader, and IR camera on L390 Yoga.
  • World-facing camera on L390 Yoga enabling field workers or students take photos on the go.
  • Complete Lenovo Services portfolio including premier support, deployment services, transition assistance, and asset protection.
  • Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro operating system.

Workplace transformation initiatives are in full swing, responding to the desires of energized and dynamic users. New workspaces are all about collaboration areas and greater user mobility to promote interaction and productivity. Such spaces require technology that enables more flexibility and creativity.

Positioned with price-sensitive business customers and professional consumers in mind, the L series maintains the ThinkPad reputation for ruggedness and durability. Sitting below the ThinkPad X1 premium notebooks and the mainstream corporate workhorse T and X series, the updated L390 and L390 provide users with mainstream performance and value. These highly portable notebooks with MilSpec build quality incorporate business features and solutions that address the challenges faced by users and IT departments.

Availability and pricing:

ThinkPad L390 and L390 Yoga will be available to order in black or silver this month.

L390 will start from $659 and L390 Yoga from $889.

Visit Lenovo to learn more.

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WIRED: Undersea servers stay cool while processing oceans of data

Most electronics suffer a debilitating aquaphobia. At the ­littlest­ spillage—heaven forbid Dorothy’s bucket—of water, our wicked widgets shriek and melt.

Microsoft, it would seem, missed the memo. Last June, the company installed a smallish data center on a patch of seabed just off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands; around it, approximately 933,333 bucketfuls of brine circulate every hour. As David Wolpert, who studies the thermodynamics of computing systems, wrote in a recent blog post for Scientific American, “Many people have impugned the rationality.”

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The idea to submerge 864 servers in saltwater was, in fact, quite rational, the result of a five-year research project led by future-proofing engineers. Errant liquid might fritz your phone, but the slyer, far deadlier killer of technology is the opposing elemental force, fire. Nearly every system failure in the history of computers has been caused by overheating. As diodes and transistors work harder and get hotter, their susceptibility to degradation intensifies exponentially. Localized, it’s the warm iPhone on your cheek or a wheezing laptop giving you upper-leg sweats. At scale, it’s Outlook rendered inoperable by remote server meltdown for 16 excruciating hours—which happened in 2013.

Servers underlie the networked world, constantly refreshing the cloud with droplets of data, and they’re as valuable as they are vulnerable. Housed by the hundreds, and often the thousands, in millions of data centers across the United States, they cost billions every year to build and protect. The most significant number, however, might be a single-digit one: Running these machines, and therefore cooling them, blows through an estimated 5 percent of total energy use in the country. Without that power, the cloud burns up and you can’t even fact-check these stats on Google (an operation that costs some server, somewhere, a kilojoule of energy).

Alyssa Foote

Savings of even a few degrees Celsius can significantly extend the lifespan of electronic components; Microsoft reports that, on the ocean floor 117 feet down, its racks stay 10 degrees cooler than their land-based counterparts. Half a year after deployment, “the equipment is happy,” says Ben Cutler, the project’s manager. (The only exceptions are some of the facility’s ­outward-facing cameras, lately blinded by algal muck.)

Another Microsoft employee refers to the effort as “kind of a far-out idea.” But the truth is, most hyperscalers investing in superpowered cloud server farms, from Amazon to Alibaba, see in nature a reliable defense against ever more sophisticated, heat-spewing circuits. Google’s first data center, built in 2006, sits on the temperate banks of Oregon’s Columbia River. In 2013, Facebook opened a warehouse in northern Sweden, where winters average –20 degrees Celsius. The data company Green Mountain buried its massive DC1-­Stavenger center inside a Norwegian mountain; pristine, near-freezing water from a fjord, guided by gravity, flows through the cooling system. What Tim Cook has been calling the “data-­industrial complex” will rely, if it’s to sustainably expand to the farthest reaches, on a nonindustrial means of survival.

Alyssa Foote

Underwater centers may represent the next phase, a reverse evolution from land to sea. It’s never been hard, after all, to waterproof large equipment—think of submarines, which get more watertight as they dive deeper and pressure increases. That’s really all Microsoft is doing, swapping out the payloads of people for packets of data and hooking up the trucklong pod to umbilical wiring.

Nonetheless, Cutler says, the concept “catches people’s imagination.” He receives enthusiastic emails about his sunken center all the time, including one from a man who builds residential swimming pools. “He was like, you guys could provide the heating for the pools I install!” Cutler says. When pressed on the feasibility of the business model, Cutler adds: “We have not studied this.”

Alyssa Foote

Others have. IBM maintains a data center outside of Zurich that really does heat a public swimming pool in town, and the Dutch startup Nerdalize will erect a mini green data center in your home with promises of a warm shower and toasty living room. Hyperlocal servers, part of a move toward so-called edge computing, not only provide recyclable energy but also bring the network closer to you, making your connection speeds faster. Microsoft envisions sea-based facilities like the one in Scotland serving population-dense coastal cities all over the world.

“I’m not a philosopher, I’m an engineer,” Cutler says, declining to offer any quasipoetic contemplations on the imminent fusion of nature and machine. Still,
he does note the weather on the morning his team hauled the servers out to sea. It was foggy, after a week of clear skies and bright sun—as though the literal cloud, reifying the digital, were peering into the shimmering, unknown depths.

Jason Kehe (@jkehe) wrote about drone swarms in issue 26.08.

This article appears in the January issue. Subscribe now.

More Great WIRED Stories

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New to Microsoft 365 in December: AI-powered tools to help you create your best work

This month, we released new features in Microsoft 365 that enable you to reach broader audiences, increase your efficiency, and focus on your most important tasks.

Here’s a look at what’s new in December.

Reach more people and create your best work

New AI-powered features across Microsoft 365 empower you to deliver presentations that are accessible to broader, more diverse audiences and to be more efficient in your flow of work.

Present more inclusively with live captions & subtitles in Microsoft PowerPoint—A new feature, powered by Microsoft AI, enables presenters to reach and engage all audiences with live presentation captions and subtitles that automatically appear in real-time. With live captions & subtitles in PowerPoint, you can ensure your presentations are understood by everyone, across languages and hearing access needs. This feature will support presenters across 12 spoken languages and display on-screen captions or subtitles in one of 60+ languages. Starting in January 2019, this feature will be available for Office 365 subscribers worldwide for PowerPoint on Windows 10, PowerPoint for Mac, and PowerPoint Online.

Get tricky acronym definitions automatically in Microsoft Word—Using the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft AI makes suggestions for acronym definitions specific to you and your organization while you read documents. This makes it easier for you to read documents with clarity in the flow of your work. To get started, click the Acronyms button on the Review tab to launch the Acronyms pane and see suggested definitions for acronyms. This feature is now available for all Office 365 subscribers.

Reuse existing slides in new PowerPoint presentations—Instead of recreating slides from scratch, quickly find and reuse slides from your files or from others in your organization with the help of Microsoft AI in PowerPoint. Simply click the Reuse Slides button on the Home tab to surface existing PowerPoint decks in the sidebar to browse through recommended PowerPoint decks that you have access to, view the slides in each presentation, and insert them into the deck you are creating. This feature is now available for all Office 365 subscribers.

App updates to help you achieve more

We’re introducing enhancements to some of your favorite Office apps that make it easier to focus on your work.

Faster, more focused experiences with the new design of Outlook for iOS—We’re starting to roll out updates to Outlook for iOS tailored to help you get things done faster. With more context available at a glance, you can connect, organize, and get more done. The new design includes recognizable avatars for instant recognition, optimized swipe with haptic feedback, and dynamic scrolling to easily see more inbox messages.

Increase your focus with support for macOS Mojave Dark Mode—Office for Mac support for macOS Mojave Dark Mode makes it easier on your eyes when you want to focus on your work or you’re working in low-light environments. And the updated user interface (UI) for Office for Mac makes it easier to find the features you’re looking for with crisper and sharper icons. macOS Dark Mode and UI refresh for Office for Mac will roll out to all users over the next few weeks.

Other updates

  • The password-less protection for access management white paper is now available to help guide you in reducing your risk exposure with alternatives to passwords such as biometrics and public key cryptography in Windows 10 PCs and many of the latest mobile devices.
  • New features in Microsoft Bookings help you better manage your appointments with enterprise-grade security controls, an improved mobile app, and integrations with Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, and third-party payments.
  • New Graph APIs in Teams provide automation capabilities to help streamline the process of creating and customizing teams.
  • Files uploaded to Office 365-connected Yammer groups will now be stored in SharePoint, providing enhanced security and compliance capabilities, including DLP, eDiscovery, conditional access, and retention policies.