Microsoft Releases Office 2016, With Features Focused on Teamwork

Microsoft is giving one of its most successful products, Office, a big update. Consumers who use the software should get used to seeing more of them.

The company will begin shipping on Tuesday Office 2016, an overhaul of the software suite, which offers well-known apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and Outlook. People will be able to buy copies of the software in stores and online; or, if they have a subscription to the software though Microsoft’s Office 365 service, their existing applications will be automatically updated in the coming weeks.

There are numerous changes in Office 2016, with the most prominent ones designed to improve how the software is used by groups of people to collaborate. But one of the biggest changes is that Office 2016 signals a major push toward delivering the software as a continuing service to consumers, a model toward which Microsoft has slowly been shifting its entire business. More than a billion people use Office.

For a few years now, corporate users have been able to get regular online Office updates with new features, if they subscribe to it as a service. Now consumers will get the same treatment, seeing new features at least once a month, John Case, a Microsoft corporate vice president, said in an interview last week.

There are already 15 million consumers subscribing to Office 365.

Google has been doing these routine updates with its online-only apps for years now. That’s a bit easier when your apps run in a web browser, as Google’s do. But most of Microsoft’s customers are running Office apps that are installed on their computers.

Google has also had collaboration features in its apps for some time, and now Microsoft is playing catch-up there, too. In the Word application that is part of Office 2016, for example, two or more users of the software will be able type into the same document and see the changes in each of their copies of the file in real time. (Microsoft has had this feature in web versions of Office for a while.)

That is something people have been able to do in a Google Docs file for a long time. Mr. Case said it took Microsoft awhile to get the capability right in its apps, which he said far exceed the power of Google’s and other online apps. “For serious authoring, really the only effective way to do it is in these apps,” he said.

Office 2016 will also let users initiate Skype voice and video calls, chats and other communication directly from within an Office document. Microsoft has also added a feature it calls “modern attachments,” which allows everyone copied on an email using Outlook 2016 to automatically gain access to a shared file on a cloud storage service. That is meant to prevent situations where email recipients begin editing out-of-date files sent as attachments.

“This is the first release of Office truly built for teamwork from the ground up,” Mr. Case said.