Microsoft has just announced that now we can download and try Microsoft Office 2016 for free. Of course it is not the final version, as Microsoft will add some more features and make them integrated better with this best Office suite. Previously, the free preview version was only available for business, commercial customers, IT pros and selected developers.
Anyone who wanted to try it out, was also had an ‘Office 365 ProPlus’ subscription. But now, everyone can start downloading and installing Microsoft Office 2016 free preview. Just like if you are trying to install Windows 10 Technical Preview, Microsoft hopes for feed backs to make it better suite our needs.
What’s new in Office 2016?
As you can read at Office blog there are some new features and functionality we can see in Office 2016 free preview. Some of them are not really new. But they are much better than what we have on previous version of Microsoft Office.
Highlighted Features:
- Addition of new dark and colorful themes
- Create, open, edit and save Office files in the cloud from your desktop
- Real-time co-authoring
- Tell Me – a new search tool in Word, PowerPoint and Excel
- Clutter – a new Exchange feature in Outlook
- Insights – powered by Bing to find contextual information from the web
Accessibility:
- Improvement in keyboard accessibility for high-value Excel features like PivotTables and Slicers
- Fixed readability issues in Outlook
Outlook:
Following improvements have been made to Outlook 2016:
- RPC-based sync replaced by new MAPI-HTTP protocol to support Exchange/Outlook connectivity
- Use of foreground network calls eliminated to make Outlook more responsive on unreliable networks
- Support for multi-factor authentication through integration with Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)
- Improvements in email delivery performance such as downloading messages, displaying message list and showing new emails after resuming from hibernation
- New settings to better manage disk storage by only retaining 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days of mail on the device
- Improvements in reliability, performance and usability of Outlook search
- Integration of FAST-based search engine in Exchange
Click-to-Run deployment:
Office 365 subscribers will get new deployment features as following:
- Better network traffic management with the help of new Background Intelligence Transfer Service (BITS)
- Better integration with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to allow admins to efficiently download and distribute monthly Office updates
- New options to manage the frequency of feature updates and bug fixes download
- Simplified activation management to allow admins to manage device activations across users
Data Loss Protection (DLP):
In past DLP feature was available in Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint only. Now the same feature has been implemented in Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs of Office 2016. With the help of DLP, you can create, manage and enforce polices for content authoring and document sharing as a part of user restrictions.
Information Rights Management (IRM):
Implementation of IRM protection in Visio files to enable both online and offline protection of Visio diagrams.
How to Download Office 2016 Preview?
You can download and install Office 2016 preview using following links:
Download Office 2016 Free Public Preview
You’ll need to activate your copy of Office 2016 free Preview after installation process. Here is the product key you can use to activate it on your computer:
NKGG6-WBPCC-HXWMY-6DQGJ-CPQVG
When will final version of Microsoft Office 2016 be available?
According to the news and announcement from Microsoft, Microsoft Office 2016 will be available in fall 2015. The exact date is not confirmed yet.
