Microsoft launches Office 2016; says it's still 'leading the way' in productivity tools

Some new bells and whistles, but mostly just a solid cloud-based update

Microsoft has officially launched Office 2016, and with it promises better "team working", "collaboration" and "efficiency" in the "most secure yet" version of the suite. It'll also be "perfect for Windows 10".

These statements all come from Richard Ellis, Office division director for Microsoft UK, who Computing spoke to last week during a walk-through of the new Office.

Ellis was particularly keen to promote Office as a "rich, native desktop app" when Computing compared the increasing focus on integration between services and mass collaboration to Google's cloud-based Google Docs and Google for Work ecosystems.

Indeed, Skype is now a bigger internal feature, allowing individuals or even whole teams to work together on a document, with marked up named stakeholders dotted all over live documents.

"We think we're leading the way in doing this [collaboration]," said Ellis. "The magic comes alive when you take the rich desktop client and tie it into cloud services," he added, not without hyperbole.

Even video calls on Skype can be started within documents, making for a hugely collaborative environment.

"Clutter", which has already gone live in the Office 365 version of Outlook, is also a feature Ellis was pushing. While we'd encountered it in our own inboxes for the past couple of months, we weren't quite aware that the three or four daily newsletters it had ringfenced and hidden away was a result of "machine learning".

Intelligent junk filtering is clearly something Microsoft is very serious about.

There are also other neat and sensible fixes. For example, when attempting to attach a document to an email, a "recent documents" list is the first thing to appear. This is clearly a genuine, no-brainer time saver. Attaching a OneDrive document will now send a link, with controllable direct-editing privileges.

Computing pointed out that access rights for non-Microsoft account users had sometimes been problematic when sharing files. It was confirmed that - obviously still depending on your IT department's decisions - access rights outside Microsoft accounts should be easier to attain.

"Attach as copy" is also a new feature which will download a fresh copy of a file from OneDrive and attach it like any standard file.

Another interesting feature, though one we've yet to properly test, is the "Tell me" function. This is a sort-of more passive, ephemeral Mr Clippit. "Tell me" attempts to work out what you want to do by way of hover-over guides and a simple context and language-sensitive search box, which pops up to help. The idea is that you are assisted as and when you need it, rather than when an irritating floating paper clip erroneously decides you might.

Computing also asked why Cortana was not involved in this help process, but Ellis replied that Cortana integration does exist, but that it simply didn't make it into the demo we were showed. Again, expect more information here after our extended hands-on over the next few weeks.

Finally, we asked Ellis to summarise how Office 2016 is the "most secure yet": "We've now put information rights management into all the apps. You're going to have much more control over that," he replied. Fair enough.

Microsoft Office 2016 is available right now, should you be that way inclined.