Microsoft Introduced New Microsoft 365 Products and Features

Microsoft today announced that the company has rebranded some of its Office products, previously known as Office 365 Personal and Home, to Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family, respectively. The new branding will be rolled out on April 21, 2020.

Microsoft has also updated the products with a number of improvements.

Microsoft Editor

There is a new Microsoft Editor app that allows you to write better, available in Word, Outlook, and on web.

Writing doesn’t come easy for many of us. In fact, our research shows that about half of us aspire to become better writers. That’s why today, we unveiled a major expansion to Microsoft Editor, an AI-powered service available in more than 20 languages, now accessible across Word and Outlook.com, and as a standalone browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Whether you’re writing a paper for school or updating your LinkedIn profile, Editor helps you put your best foot forward as you write.

Excel

Excel has got a new Money feature. It is a financial tracking solution.

A secure and simple process powered by Plaid allows you to connect your bank and credit card accounts to Money in Excel, so you can import transactions and account balances automatically and create a personalized workbook leveraging the rich features of Excel. Money in Excel can help you improve your spending habits by providing personalized insights on your monthly spending and proactive alerts about price changes for recurring payments, bank fees, overdraft warnings, and more.

Also, the app has got new data types, e.g. "food" to track your diet progress.

Presenter Coach in PowerPoint

Presenter Coach is an option in PowerPoint that uses AI to detect if you’re talking too fast, saying “umm” too much, or just reading the text from your slides. The update adds two new AI-powered features in PowerPoint Presenter Coach exclusively for Microsoft 365 subscribers— monotone pitch and speech refinement. With monotone pitch, Presenter Coach will listen to your tone of voice and give feedback in real-time to suggest adding some variation where needed. With speech refinement, Presenter Coach will give grammar suggestions including how to better phrase your speech. These new Presenter Coach features will be available to everyone through a free preview, and then eventually only to Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Family Safety

Microsoft Family Safety is a new mobile app coming on iOS and Android for Microsoft 365 subscribers. It manages screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox and tracks digital activities of family members.

Microsoft Family Safety helps you stay connected with location sharing and notifications when a family member arrives or departs a location like home, school, or work, to help give you the peace of mind that your family is where they need to be. And, for inexperienced drivers in the household, you can use driving reports to help build better habits behind the wheel with the peace of mind knowing that we don’t share your information with third parties, such as insurance companies.

Skype and Microsoft Teams

A new feature in Skype, called Meet Now. lets you easily create video meetings in as little as three clicks for free, no signups or downloads required.

With updated Microsoft Teams, you will be able connect, stay organized, and collaborate with family and friends. Create groups to plan trips with friends; organize a neighborhood gathering or your next book club meeting. You’ll be able to connect in a group chat, make video calls, collaborate over shared to-do lists and assign tasks to specific people, coordinate schedules, share photos and videos, all in one place. Teams will allow you

• to share grocery lists,
• to organize across family calendars,
• to store important information like Wi-Fi passwords and account info,
• to see location updates when your family members arrive home or at other locations like work or school.

The features above will reach the Teams Mobile app in the coming months.

Microsoft 365 Personal and Family will be available on April 21, and pricing will be the same as it is for Office 365 Personal and Home. Existing users will be automatically moved to the new plan.

Finally, Microsoft renames some of business SKUs of the Office 365 Family. For business products, there are no new features available, it is only the name change.

• Office 365 Business Essentials => Microsoft 365 Business Basic
• Office 365 Business Premium => Microsoft 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft 365 Business => Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Office 365 Business and Office 365 ProPlus will become Microsoft 365 apps.