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Technology Advice for Small Businesses

The perks of being an Office Insider

Office 365 is already packed with the latest productivity features, but for premium perks, opt for the Office Insider program. This gives Office subscribers a heads up on upcoming Microsoft releases and updates before other companies do. Here’s why Office Insider is perfect for business owners.

Early Access

Subscribing to Office Insider gives you access to new innovations, security updates, and bug fixes months before they are released to the public. This insider feature is available in two levels: the fast ring where updates are rolled out more frequently, but come with a few bugs, and the slow ring where updates are released slower, but come with little to no software bugs.

What’s new for Office Insiders?

    1. Ideas in Excel
      Ideas is a bolt-shaped icon at the top right corner of the screen that helps you understand your data through high-level summaries, trends, and patterns. It will analyze your data and create attractive visuals about it in the task pane.
    2. Animated 3D graphics
      Animated 3D graphics like beating hearts, orbiting planets, and rampaging T-rex are now available on Powerpoint. You can insert 3D models from the internet and animate them with the Runner badge to spice up your PowerPoint slides.
    3. New proofreading tools
      Editor can now mark issues on spelling, grammar, and style with red, blue, and gold underlines. It provides suggestions to improve your writing in the Editor pane, which even explains the suggestions to better help you pick the best one.
    4. New look for the ribbon icons
      Ribbon icons now have crisp, clean lines, are visually optimized for all devices, and automatically updated.
    5. Coming Soon
      Outlook occasionally releases dramatic new features and for some people, it can be a little bit overwhelming. The Coming Soon feature allows you to have a window of time to try out new features before they become permanent.

Competitive Advantage

By being an Office 365 Insider, you can test the waters and get acquainted with the features way ahead of your competition.

Reserving a meeting room can be a lot easier now through Outlook. Misspelled search terms are now automatically managed by Outlook. Also, with the new supercharged VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and MATCH functions, you can easily find answers to your queries.

Feedback

Subscribing to the Insider program also allows you to give your feedback directly to the Microsoft product team. It will help you to accustom yourself with the features earlier, and you’ll contribute to making Office 365 better for other users worldwide. You’ll be a part of the ongoing process of Office improvement.

Office Insider can open up your company to a wide variety of productivity-boosting features. The only question you have to ask yourself now is: Do I want to be at the cutting edge of tech innovations?

Contact us today to find out how you can get on the inside and know the latest Office updates.