Google has made a Google Drive plug-in for Microsoft Office. That’s right, Google made it. It’s not Microsoft trying to use Google’s APIs to make one. Google made it. No, really.
This is the same Google that doesn’t make any apps for its largest competitor’s mobile platform, Windows Phone. Well, except for Google search, which conveniently doesn’t have Google Now. Now even a YouTube app.
While Office 2016 for Windows is still in preview, Office 2016 for Mac is ready to go, and if you’re an Office 365 subscriber, you can get it right now.
Of course, Office 2016 for Mac doesn’t include all of the things that Office 2016 for PCs does. There’s no Publisher or Access; however, you do get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Skype, and OneDrive, which is a pretty sweet suite.
Ever since that early Windows 10 Technical Preview build shipped that changed the way OneDrive works, I have been very vocal in the fact that I will not be upgrading to Windows 10. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I rely too much on the OneDrive functionality that they stripped out of it.
While OneDrive placeholders are gone for good, Microsoft has promised an “alternative” to the deprecated placeholders, which won’t be available in time for the release of Windows 10 on July 29. It’s coming in late 2015.
If you’re not familiar with OneDrive placeholders are. It’s the way OneDrive integration works in Windows 8.1. With any Windows 8.1 PC you sign into with your Microsoft account, you can see your entire OneDrive. You can use it as your file system, using your local storage for only apps.
I have been using Office 2016 Preview for a few weeks now and I think it’s fantastic. It’s a very pleasant experience. Today, Office 2016 got updated with some new features.
Real time collaborating is finally available for Microsoft Word, a feature available in the Office Web Apps since 2013 and available in Google Docs since the year 1872. There’s also the insights feature, previously available in Word and Outlook. Now, it’s made its way to Excel and PowerPoint.
For those of us that are in the loop, this is something that we suspected would happen. The Office universal apps are going to be free for all Windows 10 users.
Currently, Office is free for all screens under 10″, which makes Office for phones free, Office for iPad free, and Office for some tablets free. Even large Android tablets need to pay for Office.
Now, everyone on Windows 10 will have the option to get free Office universal apps, no matter what your screen size is. It still raises the question of how Microsoft is going to make money, given that Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users and now 90% of people have no reason to purchase Office 365. We’ll just have to find out.
This is a pretty big deal. OneNote is going to have integration with WordPress, CloudHQ, and Equil.
Probably the biggest deal here, at least for me, is WordPress integration. Users of WordPress will be able to write up a blog post in OneNote and publish it with the click of a button. Of course, this is a feature that has been available in Microsoft Word for years, a feature that I abandoned as the actual WordPress editor is much more feature rich.
Ok, let’s clear out the multiple elephants in the room. First of all, this is not Clippy. Second of all, I’m going to take a wild guess and say it doesn’t get named Office Now or they end up having to rebrand it. After all, we’ve seen SkyDrive become OneDrive and then they lost another case to Sky Broadcasting over Skype. I feel like this might be a problem with Google Now.
Now onto the actual functionality of Office Now. Office Now is a work assistant app, something of a Cortana helper, although I find it odd that Cortana needs a helper, as Cortana is the helper.
Microsoft has released preview versions of Project 2016 and Visio 2016. Like the Office 2016 public preview that was announced last week, Project 2016 and Visio 2016 are only available for a trial if you do not have a corresponding Office 365 subscription.
Let me be a little more specific. If you have an Office 365 Home or Office 365 Personal subscription, you can download the Office 2016 Preview from your Office 365 account and use it forever. If you do not have an Office 365 subscription, it is a trial. There is no word on how long these trials last.
It gets a little more tricky with Project 2016 and Visio 2016. You need to be an Office 365 for Business customer and you need to have the additional plan for Visio and/or Project.
Looks like the productivity company is working on more productivity, this time with two new apps, OneClip and Revolve.
Microsoft’s upcoming OneClip app allows you to copy once and paste anywhere. For example, you could copy text from your iOS device and paste it into your Windows PC.
Revolve is a combination of a calendar app and a contacts app, which promises to deliver information from “a variety of sources” about someone that you’re meeting.
A cash cow would be anything that requires little investment to generate large amounts of money for the company. Think of it like a cow. Once you’ve paid for the cow, you keep getting milk for the life of the cow.
In business, a cash cow is not considered a good thing. After all, when you’ve got a cash cow, sure, it generates a lot of cash, but you have nowhere to go but down.
Office is Microsoft’s cash cow. That’s obvious. Out of Microsoft’s five businesses, Office is, by a huge margin, the most profitable one. To show that a cash cow isn’t the best thing in the world, Windows is now number three, behind Microsoft’s cloud services.
