Today’s post was written by Arpan Shah, senior director for the Office 365 team. Over the past year, we released over 450 updates to Office 365, as noted by Julia White in this recent Office Mechanics show. As customers move from on-premises software to the cloud, they need new tools and processes to manage and administer change. We are committed to not only deliver the best productivity experience to end users but also provide an optimum experience to admins and developers who run and build on the service. On today’s Office Mechanics show, I’m excited to tell you about some of the improvements we’ve made to Office 365 change management and tools—all based on your feedback. Rolling out updates I want to assure you that we recognize how Office 365 updates can potentially impact your organization. To ensure we deliver high quality updates and give you time to prepare, we will continue to improve the way updates are rolled out (illustrated below) to catch issues and obtain your feedback early. It begins with our feature teams of engineers (Ring 0) who build and test proposed changes. Next, our Office 365 team (Ring 1) takes a test drive before releasing proposed updates to all Microsoft employees (Ring 2). Only after passing three internal hurdles do updates begin rolling out to our First Release customers (Ring 3). Once validated by our First Release customers, we incorporate their feedback before worldwide rollout (Ring 4). The sheer scale of Office 365 means that we stagger release to tenants, with some changes taking a few weeks or more before they’re implemented worldwide. First Release lets you try updates early First Release is designed to help customers prepare for updates. You can opt in to experience updates ahead of worldwide rollout within your tenant. In the show, I demonstrate how easy it is to turn on First Release in the Office 365 admin center for your organization as well as the new capability—based on your feedback—which allows you to select specific people to receive updates early. Learn how you can see changes before the rest of your organization when you enable First Release. Making your life easier We’re working hard to make your life easier in other ways, including some great resources: Office 365 Roadmap—Follow Office 365 features as they progress through the development lifecycle, from development to rollout and launch. To stay up-to-date, it’s best to check the Roadmap every couple of weeks, or at least once a month. We added a "Recently updated" filter based on your feedback. Message Center—This is where we post messages related to key changes to the service that you need to either be aware of or take some action. We recommend checking the Message Center on a daily basis. Note, you must be an Office 365 admin to access the Message Center. Admin App—We updated the Office 365 Admin App on Windows Phone, iOS and Android so you can access Message Center, monitor service health and do simple admin tasks from whatever phone you prefer. Success.Office.com—This is your one-stop shop for everything you need to deploy and drive adoption of Office 365. Announcement and flyer templates and other great resources are here to help end users onboard and get excited about upcoming changes. Please watch today’s show for demos of these Office 365 resources and see how easy it is to sign up for First Release, use the mobile Admin App and take advantage of Success.Office.com. Provide your thoughts in the "Join the conversation" section below. We’re listening to your feedback and continuously making improvements. —Arpan Shah The post Managing Office 365 updates appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard DiZerega talk to Andrew Salamatov about the Outlook announcements at Build and Ignite along with a two hackathons that were run in New York and Chicago. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP58_PaulKatz.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Office Dev Show Episode 4—Getting started with PHPOffice 365 Developer Patterns and Practices: August 2015 release Office 365 API updates—OneNote Office add-in updates—PowerPoint, Word, Excel Property Manager Hero Demo version 2 Ships! Connecting to Office 365 from an Office Add-in by Richard DiZerega Contacts API Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform (UWP) by Richard DiZerega Connecting to Office 365 APIs from a Windows 10 UWP by Richard DiZerega Glyma for SharePoint is now open source! by Paul Culmsee The Office 365 API—OneDrive / Files API by Add-in Express How to setup a simple STS for web application development—Part 1 of 3 by Bas Lijten Configure claims-based web applications using OWIN WsFederation middleware by Bas Lijten A Worldmap list visualization for SharePoint OnLine by Yuri Burger Web Add-ins—Coercion types in Word By Cindy Meister VBA->JS: Error handling (Syntax & Concept) By Cindy Meister My Experiences with the Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets By Daniel Laskewitz Modify Regional and Language settings with JSOM and JavaScript by Vardhaman Despande All you need to know about Azure Active Directory Applications in a few lines by Stephane Eysken’s Webcam add-in for SharePoint by John Liu Show notes EfficiencyNext @napkatz Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available iTunes or search for it on "Office 365 Developer Podcast" or add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Paul Katz Paul Katz is president and chief software architect of EfficiencyNext, a software solutions company in Washington DC. Paul has worked with Microsoft technologies for the last 18 years and has been an active SharePoint developer over the last 5 years, pursuing integration stories both by the book and by using new design patterns. Most recently, Paul has migrated much of his skills onto Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365, leveraging tighter DevOps models the new platforms enable. A busy parent with two kids, Paul understands the need to extract value out of every minute and sees Office 365 and the Add-Ins model as powerful tools for doing so. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and frequent speaker are worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at www.richdizz.com, and can be found on twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. In his spare time, Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician, and lightning fast runner. Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Episode 058 with Paul Katz on building Office add-ins for enterprise—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

If you use PowerPoint at work or at home, keyboard shortcuts can be a great time saver. Here are some little-known keyboard shortcuts I’ve discovered over the last few years while working on the PowerPoint team. These keyboard shortcuts are designed for PowerPoint for Windows. If you are using PowerPoint for Mac, you can still use them if you replace Ctrl with CMD (⌘) unless stated otherwise. I hope you find these keyboard shortcuts as useful as I have! Draw horizontal or vertical lines Press and hold the Shift key while inserting lines to make sure they are perfectly horizontal, vertical or at a 45-degree angle. Keep objects in proportion Press and hold the Shift key while resizing shapes and other objects to keep their proportions consistent. This is handy if you want to resize a circle without accidentally turning it into an oval. Duplicate an object Adding a bunch of identical objects? Just select your object and press Ctrl+D to duplicate it. This also works on slides. Copy and paste formatting If you want to format an object to look just like another object without reapplying all of the formatting by hand, use the formatting clipboard. Select the object whose formatting you want to copy and press Ctrl+Shift+C. Then, select the objects that you want to have the same formatting and press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste the formatting. This also works on the slide thumbnails if you have a slide background or theme that you want to copy from slide to slide. This keyboard shortcut makes use of the Format Painter feature, which also allows you to copy formatting from one shape to another. The keyboard shortcut is a good one to remember since it packs even more power—once you’ve copied the formatting, you can paste the formatting onto as many shapes as you like without having to copy it again. Group and ungroup To group objects together, just select the objects and press Ctrl+G. To ungroup, select the object and press Ctrl+Shift+G. If you’re a Mac user, press CMD+Option+G to group and CMD+Option+Shift+G to ungroup. Insert a new slide Press Ctrl+M to insert a new slide after the currently selected slide. For PowerPoint for Mac, the keyboard shortcut is the same; you don’t need to substitute CMD. Zoom Press and hold the Ctrl key while using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out in the editor. On a touch device, you can pinch to zoom. For PowerPoint for Mac, this is another one where you don’t have to substitute CMD. Center or align text To quickly center text, press Ctrl+E. Not happy with your centered text? To go back to left alignment, press Ctrl+L, or press Ctrl+R to right align the text. Clear formatting To remove all formatting from selected text, press Ctrl+Spacebar. This will reset the text back to the default formatting. PowerPoint content placeholders have logic built in to make sure your text has the right size and formatting to match the rest of your presentation. If you’ve changed the formatting for some text or you have pasted in text that already had formatting on it, you can use the clear formatting shortcut to make the text match the design of the rest of your presentation again. To clear formatting on PowerPoint for Mac, simply click the Clear Formatting button  on the Home tab. Start Slideshow Done editing and ready to present? To start a Slideshow from the first slide, just press F5. If you want to start from the current slide, press Shift+F5 instead. As a bonus, here are a few more keyboard shortcuts you might have forgotten about. Happy editing! Action Windows Mac Select all Ctrl+A ⌘+A Bold Ctrl+B ⌘+B Copy Ctrl+C ⌘+C Paste Ctrl+V ⌘+V Undo Ctrl+Z ⌘+Z Redo Ctrl+Y ⌘+Y Save Ctrl+S ⌘+S New presentation Ctrl+N ⌘+N Find text Ctrl+F ⌘+F Check spelling F7 F7   —Lauren Janas, program manager for the PowerPoint team The post 10 little-known keyboard shortcuts for editing in PowerPoint appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Juliet Wei, senior product marketing manager for the Yammer team. When we first set out to create Yammer, we started with the simple idea that information is more valuable when it’s shared. As an enterprise social network, Yammer revolutionized information sharing in the workplace by giving millions of people a platform to make their voices heard and discover what others across the company are working on. Recently we announced Yammer’s on a mission to bring the benefits of open collaboration to teamwork. Since then, we’ve introduced Office Online integration for better document collaboration in Yammer; external messaging, which lets teams easily connect with people outside their company; and Yammer for Apple Watch to enable a whole new way of staying connected with your team. Today we’re unveiling another set of exciting changes to Yammer, including a fresh new look and feel that’s designed for teamwork from the ground up. As teams spin up around a project or initiative, they need a way to filter out the noise and focus on the task at hand. Yammer groups provide a great setting for teamwork by empowering people to share and collaborate within the right context and with the right set of people. However, the default experience in Yammer to date has been the home feeds which were intended for broad network-wide sharing. To encourage teams to make Yammer groups their go-to destination, we’re delivering a number of UI enhancements and improving the experience inside groups. Some of the changes we’re delivering on the web include: Discovery feed—We’re updating the current home feed experience to focus on group updates and discovery. The renamed Discovery feed surfaces conversations you’re missing out on from relevant groups and enables you to stay connected to the most interesting content from other teams across your company. Updates in the Discovery feed clearly identify which groups the conversations come from and give you the ability to quickly navigate to and join the groups you’re not already a member of straight from the feed. Real-time group activity—We’re giving you better peripheral vision into your groups no matter where you are in Yammer. Real-time indicators in the left-hand navigation pane call your attention to group activity as it happens, alerting you to all your currently active groups and teammates. The Discovery feed surfaces group conversations you’re missing out on and makes it easy for you to navigate to and join groups from the feed. Group activity shows up in real time in the left-hand navigation pane. Immersive group experience—Because Yammer groups serve as a home base for teams, we’re giving them a greater sense of place and making them more engaging with a full-width header, a cleaner look to focus your attention on high impact activity and content, and a wider feed for your team conversations. Next Group notification—Getting through the most important updates in your groups quickly is key when you’re juggling multiple projects. When you’re done viewing the new conversations in each group, a banner appears prompting you navigate to your next group, so you can get through your projects faster. Groups have a greater sense of place and are more engaging. The Next Group notification prompts you to move on after you’ve viewed the new conversations in a group. We’re also taking major steps to reorient Yammer’s mobile apps around groups to meet the needs of fast-moving teams. Over the coming months, you’ll see significant changes to your mobile experience, including a better way to get through your group content and new capabilities that boost mobile team collaboration. Group Updates feed—The Group Updates feed provides a simple workflow through relevant content in your groups, so you can catch up on urgent conversations and discover what others are working on. You can navigate easily between the feed and your groups, as well as join groups you’re not already a part of from the feed itself. The Group Updates feed will come to Android first with iOS following shortly after. The Group Updates feed provides a simple workflow on mobile, enabling you to quickly catch up on your groups and easily navigate between the feed and your groups. Yammer for Apple Watch—As announced last week, Yammer for Apple Watch provides instant notification of your conversations and activities at a glance and lets you take quick action, so you have fewer to-dos at the end of the day. It’s a great companion app for the Yammer mobile and web experiences. Powerful new photo-sharing and markup—Translate images into action with the ability to attach multiple images at once and even mark up the parts of the images you want to call out with your finger to help others see what you see. Translate images into action by marking up photos with your finger and sharing them with your team. Attach files from external file storage services—Yammer’s mobile apps let you find and attach all your files, including those stored on external services such as OneDrive and Dropbox, as well as files stored in Yammer and on your mobile device. Inline at-mentioning—Bringing others into the conversation has never been easier with inline at-mentioning now available on mobile. Yammer’s type-ahead functionality suggests people and groups to address while you compose your message, removing the need to at-mention them separately. Search and invite coworkers by email—Finding your coworkers on Yammer is possible, even if they haven’t started using Yammer yet. Searching by name or email enables you to find existing members and invite new members to join Yammer from your Yammer mobile app. All of these experiences take place against a backdrop of continual improvements in Yammer, such as a new responsive design optimized for larger screen sizes and faster performance on web and mobile. Up next in 2016: deeper integration with Office 365 to open up even more possibilities for teams. We’re working on wrapping up the foundational identity work with Azure Active Directory, leveraging Office Graph signals for better people and group suggestions; using Office Online for multi-user coauthoring in Yammer; and hooking into the Office 365 Groups service to enable cross-workload scenarios with OneDrive, Outlook, OneNote and Skype. And to improve collaboration with extended team members, we’ll also be delivering external groups, which lets users invite outside participants into their Yammer groups. We’re excited about taking teamwork to the next level with these changes and hope you are too. Give your teams the gift of Yammer and start using Yammer groups for your projects and initiatives today. —Juliet Wei   Frequently asked questions Q. Where can I go to learn more about using Yammer for team collaboration? A. If you’d like to learn more about how Yammer helps improve teamwork, join our YamJam. On Wednesday, September 9, the Office 365 Network will host a YamJam from 9-10 a.m. PDT / 5-6 p.m. GST. Members of the product engineering team will be on hand to answer your questions. For those unfamiliar with a YamJam, it is similar to a "TweetJam" on Twitter or an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) on Reddit, except it takes place on Yammer. It provides the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of internal Microsoft experts on a particular topic. Here’s how to participate: Request access to the Office 365 Network. All requests will be approved as quickly as possible. Join the Enterprise Social group. You can find it by using the Browse Groups function or through the search bar. Log in at 9 a.m. PDT / 5 p.m. GST on Wednesday, September 9 to ask questions, follow the discussions and connect with Microsoft team members. Q. When will these new features be available? Do I need to do anything to enable them in my Yammer network? A. Yammer develops in short, iterative cycles and only ships features that are proven to increase engagement. While we’ve already shipped many of these experiences on mobile and web to customers, we’re still testing and refining others to ensure we deliver the best possible user experience. This means some users will see an early version of a new feature appear for a while in their Yammer experience while we are testing it, then disappear as we pull it back for further work and finalization. Our goal is to complete and ship the remaining team experiences outlined above to 100 percent of our customers by year end. Because Yammer is a multi-tenant cloud service, no action is required to enable these new capabilities. To see upcoming features and experiences, visit roadmap.office.com. The post Optimizing Yammer for teams appeared first on Office Blogs.

Office 2016 for Mac arrived this month, along with Office Mobile apps for Windows 10, a new universal iOS OneNote app, and more. For business, new compliance capabilities and IT management controls were added, along with enhancements to Yammer and Power Query. On the mobile front, Azure Rights Management is now available for Office for iPad and iPhone, there’s a new app designed for in-and-out email, and the Skype for Business Windows Phone app is here. Enterprise customers can preview the new Skype for Business capabilities, and teachers and students can now move back and forth between Office 365 and Moodle or Open edX without logging in each time. For developers, the new edition of the monthly Office 365 Dev Digest is out, Office 365 channels are live, and The Office Dev Show has begun. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: June 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates New chart types available in Office 2016 Preview—Now you have more ways to explore data and tell rich stories across Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Six powerful new charts help you quickly visualize common financial, statistical and hierarchical data: Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap and Sunburst. Office 2016 for Mac is here—The new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote—each with major updates—give Mac users the familiar Office experience paired with the best of Mac. Office for Mac is cloud-connected, for quick access to your documents on any device, and it’s available in 139 countries and 16 languages. Office 365 subscribers can get the newest version of Office for Mac today. OneNote updates for iOS and Android—Now there’s a universal iOS OneNote app that works on both iPad and iPhone. iPad users need to get the new OneNote app from the store; iPhone users already have it. With the new app, iPad users have some of the recent updates made to the iPhone app, like the Today Widget and Recent Notes. The updated OneNote for Android app introduces one of the top feature asks—the ability to move or copy pages from one section or notebook to another. WYSIWYG editing in Office Mix quizzes and polls—You’re no longer limited in Office Mix to asking questions that can be typed on a QWERTY keyboard. With WYSIWIG editing support in quizzes and polls, you can type mathematical and scientific formulas. Even if you’re not a math or science teacher, you now have a lot more freedom to include images, tables, bulleted and numbered lists, and special characters in quiz and poll questions in your Office Mixes. Office Mobile apps for Windows 10 are here!—The Office Mobile apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote—give you on-the-go productivity on Windows 10 tablets and small screen devices, with full fidelity viewing. The apps are fully cloud connected, and your docs are now automatically saved for you. Plus, new features, like Tell Me, make it easier for you to do what you want. You can download and install the apps from the new Windows Store today in 190 countries. Office 365 for Business and Education updates* Preview of new Skype for Business services in Office 365—Office 365 enterprise customers can register for three technical previews of the new Skype for Business voice and meetings capabilities in Office 365: Skype Meeting Broadcast, PSTN Conferencing and Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling. Later this year, with strategic partners, direct connections to Office 365 Skype for Business customers will be delivered through Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365. Office 365 now offers integration with educational open source software—Now teachers and students can move back and forth between Office 365 and Moodle or Open edX without the need to log in each time. For example, if you’re logged in to Office 365 and working on a Word document, you can easily upload the document to Moodle as an assignment. You can also allow Moodle or Open edX to appear in the My Apps app launcher within Office 365, synchronize your Outlook calendars to a Moodle course calendar, embed an Office Mix in Moodle, and more. Compliance toolset for public folders—The Office 365 archiving and eDiscovery toolset is being extended to include public folders. You can now place public folder content on hold to preserve it for legal or regulatory requirements and perform eDiscovery functions on public folder data, including search, preview and export. Entire public folders or specific content can be preserved immutably, and all administrative activities on public folders are fully audited. Skype for Business Windows Phone app is here!—The new app includes many enhancements, including an intuitive interface, more emoticons and improved server communications. The enhanced security with at-rest data encryption means your conversation history and voicemail are encrypted by default. And your recent conversations are now synchronized across devices, whether they took place on your PC, tablet or phone, as long as you’re running the latest server software. Find out how you can upgrade. New activity logging and reporting capabilities for Office 365—The new activity logging and reporting capabilities provide even greater visibility into actions taken on your content and greater control over access to your data in Office 365. They include: the Office 365 activity report to investigate a user’s activity, comprehensive logging capability for user and admin activity events, the Search PowerShell command or cmdlet, and a preview of the Office 365 Management Activity API. Power Query for Excel updates—The recently added or improved features include: improvements to the ODBC Connector, Navigator dialog improvements, an option to enable Fast Data Load versus Background Data Load, support for Salesforce Custom environments in Recent Sources list, easier parsing of Date or Time values out of a Text column with Date/Time information, and a new Unpivot Other Columns entry in the column context menu. New IT management controls added to OneDrive for Business—The new management options to protect and control the flow of your information include: limiting file sync to domain-joined PCs, auditing all actions taken against files, setting storage quotas, and preventing unintentional sharing to "Everyone" or "All Users." Read what the new controls can do and take a walk through them with Office Mechanics to learn how to implement them. Document collaboration in Yammer just got better!—Deeper integration with Office Online makes it easier than ever to incorporate document collaboration into teamwork. Click the Edit File link in Yammer and a new browser tab opens with a full-screen view of the document. You can make changes directly in the document using Office Online, and they’re automatically saved in Yammer. You can also now share and work on files with external participants. And with integration with Office 365, the reliability and performance of document collaboration in Yammer has improved. Tips to get started using the Mobile Device Management (MDM) feature for Office 365—It’s easy to get this built-in feature up and running to manage and secure mobile devices when they’re connected to your Office 365 organization. Learn how to set up MDM for Office 365, configure Security Groups and Device policies, enroll devices, and wipe enrolled devices and run reports. Office 365 channels are live on IFTTT—When you activate the Office 365 channels—Mail, OneDrive for Business, Calendar and Contacts—you can automate what happens with your Office 365 data to increase productivity. For example, you can create Recipes to program activities, like automatically saving a photo to OneDrive for Business or sharing that a new Office 365 contact was added to your team’s Trello board or Slack team. Check out the Office 365 sample Recipes to help you get started. Introducing Send—the app designed for in-and-out email—Send is a new app built for sending your coworkers quick, brief messages—no signatures, subject lines or salutations required. The app connects to Office 365 business and school email accounts to surface your frequent and recent contacts and enables you to have all of your communications in Outlook for reference later. Send is available for iPhone in the U.S. and Canada, and is coming soon to Windows Phone and Android phones. Azure Rights Management support comes to Office for iPad and iPhone—Azure Rights Management provides an easy way to protect data by assigning a policy to the data available in Office 2013, Office 2010 and Office for Mac. Now this policy-driven protection is available in Office for iPad and on iPhone devices, so you can view rights-protected Office documents natively on your iOS devices. Windows 10 updates for Office 365 admins—IT admins can benefit from Windows, Office and Azure Active Directory integration in three areas: joining Windows 10 to Azure Active Directory for single sign-on (SSO) to Office 365 and other services, using the Business Store portal in Windows Store to deliver Office apps, and adding Windows 10 devices to Mobile Device Management for Office 365. Read the blog post and watch the video to find out how. Office 365 Developer updates Office 365 Dev Digest for July—Stay up to date with what’s new in Office 365 development. Read the digest for the latest dev news, like one-click access to third-party apps and the new Office Dev Show. Get new and updated documentation, code samples, and patterns and practices samples, plus links to podcasts, blog posts, videos about companies using Office add-ins to extend the value of Office, and upcoming events. A new way to keep up with all the Office 365 Dev news, tips and tricks—Watch The Office Dev Show, a new dedicated Channel 9 show devoted to all things Office 365 dev-related! The show, hosted by Sonya Koptyev, will include guests from the Office 365 Extensibility engineering team and key community members. It will feature new code and capabilities added for devs to customize the Office platform, including desktop, online and mobile versions, as well as a "Get Started" series on building on the platform. The show airs weekly, on Wednesdays. Office 365 channels are live on IFTTT—When you activate the Office 365 channels—Mail, OneDrive for Business, Calendar and Contacts—you can automate what happens with your Office 365 data to increase productivity. For example, you can create Recipes to program activities, like automatically saving a photo to OneDrive for Business or sharing that a new Office 365 contact was added to your team’s Trello board or Slack team. Check out the Office 365 sample Recipes to help you get started. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: July 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Earlier this year we announced real-time co-authoring support for Word 2016 as part of the Office 2016 Preview. For the last several months, this feature has been available to preview users co-authoring Word documents stored on SharePoint Online. Today, we are pleased to announce that real-time co-authoring is also available as a first-look for Word documents stored on OneDrive as part of the latest Office 2016 Preview release. Now when two or more users running the latest preview open the same Word document from OneDrive, they can co-author with others in real-time, which allows them to see the cursor location and text edits made by the other users automatically appear as they happen. You are encouraged to try real-time co-authoring on OneDrive today. If you are receiving regular updates throughout the preview, you should have received this functionality as an update by 11 a.m. this morning. To try out this feature, all you need is a Word document stored on OneDrive and two or more people running the latest preview. Make sure to give both users edit permissions so they can both edit the file. If this is the first time you’ve tried real-time co-authoring, you will see a prompt in the upper right corner of Word asking you if you’d like to automatically share your changes. All you need to do is click Yes to join the experience. Once both authors have clicked Yes, you’ll see a flag representing the other author’s cursor position and then you will automatically see their edits come in. Please give it a try today and let us know what you think of the experience. —The Word team The post Preview real-time co-authoring on OneDrive appeared first on Office Blogs.

This month’s Power Query update includes four new or improved features, including: Option to specify Join Type in the Merge Queries dialog. Extract first, last or range of characters from a Text column. Customize the Quote Style in Split Column by Delimiter dialog. Support for UPN credentials in the Exchange connector. You can continue reading below for more details about each feature. Option to specify Join Type in the Merge Queries dialog It is now possible to specify the type of Join that you would like to apply when merging two queries using the Merge Queries dialog. These options were previously available only by manually modifying the generated formula. Now they are much more easily accessible in the Merge Queries dialog. Extract first, last or range of characters from a Text column With this update we have added user interface (UI) support to specify how many characters to extract from a Text column, starting from the beginning, end or a specific position. This new set of transformations can be found under the Text -> Extract Group in the Transform and Add Column tabs on the Query Editor ribbon. Customize Quote Style in the Split Column by Delimiter dialog Users can now switch between the CSV Quote Style and no Quote Style when splitting a column by delimiter. This option is available in the Advanced Options section of the Split Column by Delimiter dialog. Support for UPN credentials in the Exchange connector In this update, we added support for specifying a UPN (User Principal Name) as part of providing credentials to use the Exchange connector. This option is available from the Credentials prompt when using this connector. If you have already connected to Exchange before and need to modify your credentials, you can access this option from the Data Source Settings dialog. That’s all for this month. We’re making lots of incremental improvements to Power Query and we hope that you find it better with every new monthly update. Please continue sending us feedback using our "Send a Smile/Frown" feature or by voting for what you’d like to see next. —Miguel Llopis, program manager on the Power Query team   Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone. Power Query for Excel is also available in all other Excel 2013 Desktop SKUs with reduced functionality. Check out the System Requirements section on this page for more details. Download the add-in and learn more about getting started. Learn about all the powerful analytics and visualization features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI. Learn more about Power Query See all analytics and visualization features in Excel Get your Office 365 subscription Try Power BI Follow us: Facebook and Twitter The post 4 updates in Power Query for Excel appeared first on Office Blogs.

So far, we introduced you to our new chart types across Office 2016 and then dove deeper into a few of them. We showed the effectiveness of the Waterfall chart in visualizing financial statements and how hierarchical chart types, like Treemap and Sunburst, can help you explore complex data with multiple levels and categories. Now, we will take a closer look at the last group of new chart types—statistical charts. Statistical charts, which include Histogram, Pareto and Box and Whisker, help summarize and add visual meaning to key characteristics of data, including range, distribution, mean and median. There are many different approaches and opinions on how to summarize statistical data. In this blog article, we will explain how these new charts can help represent your statistical data in a way that works best for your needs. Download the Office 2016 Public Preview and try out the new charts for yourself using our sample data sets. Histogram chart illustrates the distribution of data The Histogram chart shows the distribution of your data and groups them into bins, which are groupings of data points within a given range. To show in an example, imagine we run a small bookstore and have a list of our entire selection of books and prices. The Histogram, Pareto and Box and Whisker charts can be easily inserted using the new Statistical Chart button in the Insert tab on the ribbon. The Histogram chart is the first option listed. By creating a Histogram to visualize the above table of data, we can count all the books by bins that represent price ranges. For example, notice that we have grouped all books that are above or equal to $19.95 up to, but not including, $28.95 into one bin. The next bin groups and counts all the books above or equal to $28.95 but less than $37.95 and so on. Notice this grouping as shown in the image below. In our design, we follow best practices for labeling the Histogram axis and adopt notation that is commonly used in math and statistics. For example, a parenthesis, "(" or ")", connotes the value is excluded whereas a bracket, "[" or "]", means the value is included. So for a bin that groups all the books above or equal to $10.95 but below $19.95, the axis label would look like: [$10.95, $19.95]. In the example above, the first bucket to the left has the label [$10.95, $19.95], which should be interpreted as all values between $10.95 and $19.95, inclusive. This set notation offers the cleanest layout and prevents a cluttered and verbose horizontal axis. Histogram binning algorithm In case you’re interested in how we determine the default and automatic bin sizes for the Histogram, we chose to use the widely accepted Scott’s binning algorithm, which calculates the optimal bin size as follows: If you want to specify a custom value for bin sizes or create an overflow/underflow bin that groups all the points above/below a certain value, double-click the horizontal axis in your Histogram chart and change the options in the Format Axis task pane. Gain insights through bin sizes You can gain insights by tweaking the size of the bins. For example, a bin size of 9.0 provides the bell-shaped curve or normal curve, which is seen in the example above. This curve in data is often found in nature, like in measuring the heights of people in a population, recording the IQ scores of a sample of students or determining deviations of a standardized product. At first glance, these book prices also follow a normal distribution. However, by decreasing the bin width to 6.0, the bell-shaped curve breaks down and we quickly notice that books within the price range of [$52.95, $58.95] are fewer than those books in other mid-range prices. Pareto chart highlights significant data factors The Pareto chart is useful for figuring out the most significant factors in your data and how they contribute to the entire set. Often used in quality control, the Pareto chart helps easily identify the high use cases, focusing on the big picture, rather than getting lost in the details. The Pareto chart is named after Vilfredo Pareto, most famous for his popular eponym, the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule. His principle states that a few reasons (about 20 percent) account for a majority (or about 80 percent) of issues. The Pareto chart shares similarities with the Histogram chart in that each chart displays bins that count the frequency of occurrence. However, for Pareto, the bin is categorical and not a range of values. What also makes the Pareto chart unique is its combination of columns with a line graph, which shows the cumulative contribution of each column as you move from left to right. Looking back at the bookstore example, we have data that lists all the store returns and the underlying reason, whether it was due to defects, incorrect pricing, wrong book, or a host of other causes. Reading a Pareto chart Inserting a Pareto chart automatically groups each book return into its proper category and sorts the columns from most common to least common as you traverse left to right. The Pareto chart is supposed to be read so that left vertical axis is associated with the columns, whereas the right vertical axis (in percentage) is associated with the Pareto line. The Pareto line is the running total percentage of all the book returns to the left. For example, the Pareto line starts at the center of the Defect category and intersects the right vertical axis at 40 percent, meaning Defects account for 40 percent of all book returns. Moving along the Pareto line, the next stop is the center of Incorrect Pricing. The Pareto line at Incorrect Pricing intersects the contributing percentage axis at 70 percent, which means that the combination of Defects and Incorrect Pricing account for 70 percent of all book returns. One more category over, Wrong Product intersects the Pareto axis a little bit above 80 percent, which means 80 percent of all book returns are a result of Defects, Incorrect Pricing and Wrong Product. While the Pareto line references the total contributing percentages, the columns represent the frequency or count of the book returns, so while Defects contribute to 40 percent of all book returns, the number of defect books returned is 2,000. The number of books returned for Incorrect Pricing and Wrong Product tally about 1,500 and 750, respectively. The Pareto chart is useful for discovering areas for improvement or maximizing where the bookstore should allocate its efforts. Targeting improvements to defects and incorrect pricing are more worthwhile than adjusting prices (Cost Too Much) or variety of books (Poor Quality Content). Box and Whisker characterize the distribution of data The Box and Whisker chart is designed to quickly and easily highlight important characteristics related to the distribution of your data, by providing basic statistical details like mean, median and percentile groupings, as well as illuminating outliers that exist beyond the general clustering of your data. Additionally, this chart is useful for comparing characteristics between different sets of data. Histogram and Pareto can only provide visualization for one. To illustrate these features, let’s use the bookstore data and we’ll start with a table of book prices within each genre. How statistics are used in Box and Whisker The Box and Whisker chart (above) is helping us visualize statistical characteristics about three separate categories of books—Children’s, Romance and Mystery. Notice that each group is divided into four sections, including a rectangle (the "box") that is split into two parts and thin T-shaped projections on each end (the "whiskers"). The bottom whisker is called the "Local Minimum." Just above the whisker is the bottom of the box, which marks the "first quartile." The values in between the end of the whisker and the bottom of the box are considered part of the lowest quarter of values in the data set. In other words, any book prices found in this section of the visualization are considered part of the lowest 25 percent of the entire collection of prices for that category. The range from the bottom of the box (or first quartile) to the midline inside the box (representing the median) contains the next 25 percent of listed book prices. From the midline inside the box to the top of the box (the third quartile), there lies another 25 percent of the book prices. Lastly, the distance between the top of the box and the end of the second whisker, barring any outliers, contains the final top 25 percent of the book prices. The median and mean of each category grouping of book prices are also displayed in the chart. The mean is denoted by the "X" marker in the chart and represents the average of all the data points. The mean is calculated by summing all the data points and dividing by the total number of points. The median represents the value that is in the middle of the entire set of data, after the set has been sorted from smallest to largest. For example, take the following set of numbers: 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15 The median is 7. If this series of numbers were visualized in a Box and Whisker chart, the line drawn in the middle of the box would be at 7. Outliers are points on the Box and Whisker chart that are displayed beyond the end of each whisker. Notice there is an outlier book price within the Romance category. For outliers, we designed the Box and Whisker chart to follow the Tukey industry standard, which states that values are considered outliers only if they lie 1.5 times the length of the box (known as the interquartile range) from either end of the box. The diagram below shows the threshold point to be considered an outlier. Calculating first and third quartiles with the median Calculating the first and third quartiles can be a little tricky, depending on how you handle the median. If we wanted to calculate the first quartile to include the median for the sample series of numbers, above, then we would have the following range: 1, 2, 5, 7; where 1 is the minimum and 7 is the included median. Calculating the first quartile would yield a value of 3.5, the midpoint between 2 and 5. If we consider the first quartile without the median, we would be provided the range: 1, 2, 5. In this case, calculating the first quartile would yield a value of 2. So, including or excluding the median as part of the first quartile can significantly impact the value we calculate. Let’s run the same calculations for the third quartile, just to be comprehensive. If we include the median in the calculation, then we have the following points: 7, 10, 14, 15. In this case, 12 is the third quartile. If the median were excluded in calculating the third quartile, then we would have only 10, 14 and 15 to consider. So the third quartile, in this case, would be 14. The median is excluded, by default, in the Box and Whisker chart in Excel 2016. Excluding the median in your calculations will always create a larger box relative to a Box and Whisker created with an inclusive mean. The result causes anyone interpreting your chart to believe there are more or less data points near the median for inclusive or exclusive, respectively. Notice in the side-by-side comparison below the different connotations of distribution when the median is excluded or included. To change these settings, double click the Box and Whisker chart to access the Format Data Series task pane. When to use each chart? All three new charts provide powerful and easy ways to visualize your data through a statistical viewpoint. However, each chart has unique values that may be useful for different scenarios. The Box and Whisker chart is useful for making direct comparisons of data. For example, teachers can plot and share student grades using this chart. In one visual, important attributes—like mean, median and outliers—stand out. Box and Whisker can compare multiple series, side by side, and draw differences between means, medians, interquartile ranges and outliers. The Histogram chart takes the Box and Whisker plot and turns it on its side to provide more detail on the distribution. Visualizing a histogram is more intuitive, especially for a normal distribution curve, because it is easy to recognize that many data points exist within a center. The Pareto chart is perfect for highlighting which categories contribute the most and by how much. Pareto is a one-click chart creation that automatically sorts the data and shows the proportion to the total. What do you think? We just went through the inner workings of each of these statistical chart types and how you can take advantage of each one. Try them out for yourself and let us know what you think. We have finished introducing each of our six new chart types. Download the Office 2016 Preview for Windows to learn more about these new chart types now. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below. Learn more about using the Histogram chart. Learn more about using the Pareto chart. Learn more about using the Box and Whisker chart. Share your ideas for Excel chart types and other features. The post Visualize statistics with Histogram, Pareto and Box and Whisker charts appeared first on Office Blogs.

Cloud hosted apps and bring your own device (BYOD) trends enable corporate employees to access SaaS applications and data on their personal devices almost anywhere and at any time—but with that mobility and convenience comes the challenge of protecting business data while enabling users to be productive on the go. During Microsoft Ignite, Nasos Kladakis, an expert in private and public cloud solutions, provided the definitive overview on how IT departments can protect their corporate data and continue delivering the mobility and productivity benefits that employees expect and need. Managing mobile devices goes beyond mechanisms to apply policy or provision software on a device. As discussed on the show, many organizations really have the goal to protect information—which is done via controlling access, ensuring that devices are managed, and then applying rules, policies and controls to the data itself. Check out our recent Office Mechanics show to learn about three areas where IT admins can benefit from Windows, Office and Azure Active Directory integration. On today’s show, we demonstrate how built-in Mobile Device Management (MDM) in Office 365 allows you to set up conditional access to data by a specific device. We also show the resulting user experience. New MDM capabilities were introduced almost a year ago on this Office Mechanics show and are available in Office 365 now, and they get even better when you add Microsoft Intune. To learn more and see everything in action, watch the show. And if you are an admin already using Office 365, you can start testing out most of the controls today. See you next week! —Jeremy Chapman The post Beyond MDM—how to protect your data with BYOD and SaaS implemented appeared first on Office Blogs.

PowerShell has quickly become an indispensable skill for Office 365 administrators, and if you’re like me, you are starting to gather a toolbox of useful scripts. If you are new to PowerShell for Office 365, make sure you check out our PowerShell for Office 365 site with common scenarios and sample scripts available to download. But perhaps you are looking for some more advanced scenarios, or you’re thinking about how to streamline your Office client deployment process. If that sounds like you, check out our new community GitHub project for Office IT Pro Deployment Scripts. Office 365 experts from around the world are contributing to a collection of PowerShell scripts that are designed to automate various procedures that would normally require manual intervention from an IT pro. All of the scripts are stored in a repository out on GitHub and released under the MIT license. While these scripts are provided "as is," with no warranty of any kind, we have done some testing and documentation on the scripts you will find in the Master branch. Please take the time to read through the README associated with each script carefully to ensure proper use of it. The number of scripts available in the Master branch will continue to grow as we collaborate with anyone willing to help in an effort to automate tasks and add new scripts. This project is just getting started, but here are a few scripts that we’ve already completed and are available for use: Copy-OfficeGPOSettings For IT pros that are moving to a newer version of Office and want to maintain their current group policies, this is the script for you. This script automates that process to help ensure a seamless move to a newer version without a lot of manual intervention. More information can be found in the README. Check-DiskSpace We are really excited about some of the new Excel 2016 hierarchical data charts as part of the Office 2016 Preview. But, as IT pros, we know it would be much cooler to use the new charting engine to see a graphical representation of disk space utilization. This script will output a CSV file with data around disk space utilization that can be assessed in a graphical view using new charts in Excel 2016. The folder on GitHub also contains a spreadsheet that utilizes Power Query to import the data, and then a PivotTable to organize the data, so that you can display it in a Sunburst or Treemap chart. More information can be found in the README. Get-OfficeVersion This script allows IT pros to query a local or remote workstation to find the detailed version of Office that is installed. With some tweaking, this script could be used as a solution to inventory the Office versions that are currently in your environment or quickly gather data when troubleshooting. More information can be found in the README. Get-ModernOfficeApps This script should be used by IT pros interested in taking inventory of the modern apps installed across the organization. More information can be found in the README. Create-TelemetryEnvironment This script installs and enables the telemetry agent on computers. More information can be found in the README. We’re working on new scripts and ideas every day to create a more streamlined approach for IT pros everywhere. Our hope is that you will take advantage of what is out there and perhaps even collaborate with us as we look to continue expanding on what is available. Get involved! Anyone is welcome to contribute to the Office IT Pro Deployment Scripts GitHub project, but we ask that you clone the Development branch to create a feature branch where you can make changes to existing scripts or create new ones. Information on contributing to the project can be found in this README. And of course, we would love to hear your feedback and ideas on the Office 365 Network. Thank you to our community of contributors! A community project like this couldn’t be possible without a team of passionate experts from around the world. Special thanks to Josh Gringas, Fred Duarte, Ryan Sockalosky, Martin Nothnagel, Curtis Sawin, Michael O’Donovan, Amesh Mansukhani, Matt Fine, Andrew Morris, Michael Draftz, Adam Stigall, Amit Olkar and Russ Smith. —Alistair Speirs, senior operations program manager for the Office 365 Deployment and Usage team The post Introducing the Office IT Pro Deployment Script project appeared first on Office Blogs.