Microsoft is on a cross-platform app bender. This week the company has been updating apps, adding new features to Outlook, launching new services for Office 365, and bringing apps and services to wearable devices.

Here’s a roundup of some of Microsoft’s newest office and productivity updates.

Translator for Apple Watch and Android Wear

Install the latest version of Microsoft’s Translator app for iOS or Android and you can use it to translate text simply by speaking to your Apple Watch or Android Wear device.

microsoft translator android wear

Microsoft Translator can provide instant translations for 50 different languages. Only use one or two of those languages on a regular basis? You can pin your favorite languages and settings to your watch screen for quick access.

Outlook for Apple Watch

Microsoft’s email program for iOS received a major update that now makes it possible for users to read full emails and even respond to them right from Apple Watch. Outlook Apple Watch

Apple’s native email app doesn’t even offer that much usability. The update also shows a quick look at emails and calendar events in Glances and provides more information in Notifications.

These are just two of Microsoft’s updates for wearables: the company is also offering new versions of its OneDrive and OneNote apps for Android Wear.

Outlook on the Web in Office 365

The business side of Outlook is also getting a major update in the form of Outlook on the Web, or the Outlook Web App, which is the business-side web-based interface of Outlook in Office 365 for email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

Outlook on the Web

The web app has a newly designed user interface, new email management tool including message pinning and Sweep for automated email management.

There will also be a five-day weather forecast in the calendar view, birthday and holiday calendars, and icons for quickly identifying types of events (like dinner or a party). There are also a lot of additional design tweaks on the way for the business-based Outlook on the Web app.

Sway

Microsoft’s creative storytelling visual aid is out of preview and now available to the general public.

Sway

Sway is basically a really fancy looking version of PowerPoint for millennials. It is interactive. So, in addition to creating nice looking slides, a person can click on images to make them bigger, include usable maps, or share the Sway project on social media.

The public version includes multi-user collaboration, fixes to the photo-cropping feature, and new layout controls. The program is available on PCs and Windows tablets with support for Windows phone coming soon.

Docs.com

If you want to share your Sway with the world, or any of your Office-based documents, you can now do so with Microsoft’s social feed, Docs.com.

Docs.com

The site allows users to publish their presentations so that others can view, like, add comments, and share across social media outlets.

You can organize your projects into collections. Office Mix, PowerPoint, Word, and Excel projects are displayed interactively. It is a source for creativity and a way to publish your projects needing to build your own website.

Translator for Apple Watch and Android Wear

stuff

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2 replies on “Microsoft launches new Outlook, Translator, Office apps and features”

  1. i seems microsoft has become one big construction place offering “free” unfinished so called products … always announcing features to come – and therefore not present. ….. and a lot of full mouthed bragging like apple. now all big three (apple, google, microsoft) have joined the club offering half backed stuff only to its so called customers and users. if you would do the like with cars you would end up in jail.

  2. One thing Microsoft has failed to point out is that its free apps
    don’t have some critical features found in the paid versions.

    A good case is OneNote, whose free version can export a
    notebook as a single file, but can’t read that single file back in,
    a significant gotcha.

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