I was ‘FINALLY’ able to get Office 2016 onto my surface last week as it has become available on our school tenant. Microsoft has gone all out to improve the inking and collaborative features in all off the software packages. I am currently obsessed with the inking function – in Outlook especially. I have always loved inking in OneNote and it has been awesome to have a play with the other features
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Inking in Outlook
If my favourite thing EVER. Being able to ink a quick reply is super – and means I can reply easily if I don’t have my surface connected to a keyboard (I’m terrible at typing with the touch screen). Or I can easily draw instructions or diagrams. For more ‘formal’ e-mails I would still type them out, but for quick messages on the go the inking function is perfect
And I love that you have all the options -different colours, highlighting options. AWESOME
Word
Word is still a real workhorse for me, despite my LOVE of OneNote I still have a lot of documents such as unit plans and assessment tasks in Word.The inking functions in 2013 were useful, for writing a signature, but it was a bit ‘stiff’ and limited. NOT so anymore, the inking functions are awesome
there is a handy ink to equation function (hiding behind the colour options in the pic above
But even better than that is an AMAZING equations bar that pops up when you are inking formula – I already had the formula/maths add in, but this one is AWESOME (I’m using that word a lot I know….)
This is going to make life WAY easier when I am going Aqueous Chem. Amazeballs
And feedback – why yes, it is there too 🙂
PowerPoint
Now, I basically just use powerpoint now to make Office Mixes. Office mix has a pretty good inking feature already, I loved being able to change pens as I wrote and that it inked in live time as I talked.
Now, you can ink much more easily straight into the slides, and convert your ink to shapes too
And you can highlight too – in all of the software.
Excel
Even number crunchy Excel got some inking love
There aren’t quite as many options, and I was kind of surprised their is no ink to maths function here… maybe it will be along later. That said, there are all the formulas in excel anyways….
OneNote
I didn’t think it was possible for my love of OneNote to get any bigger. But it has. The ability to draw the images, flip them round, ink to text and maths, and basically store all my stuff somewhere so I don’t lose it is AMAZING. I honestly don’t know what I did before it
I haven’t even started on all the other awesome features – having the full functionality of word while still being able to collaborate and have multiple users in superb.
The one glitch I had with the install was it did stop my sharepoint sync client working. But that is resolved now – I installed the 64 bit version and everything seems fine. So I am going to keep exploring and playing to see just what else this software can do. But for now, I’m off to reply to e-mails with inking, just cause I can
Hello!
I’m an intern working on improving Ink to Math at Microsoft. If you have time, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks,
Tracy
Hi Tracy – really happy to help 🙂