Microsoft revamps Office website for business and school users

Microsoft has updated its Office app and web site with user interface features that it hopes will make users more productive.

The updates focus on personalizing Office content for users, while also making it easier to access often-used content and actions, and to quickly create new documents.

Updates to the product include a change to the home page, which now features recommended actions based on communication that the user has had with others in Microsoft Office.

A Quick Access section also helps users to find documents related to current work. They can customize this with filters for people or file types, enabling them to quickly documents from coworkers on specific projects, Microsoft says.

The Office app and web site now also feature a My Content section that gathers all content related to the user. This is a more in-depth content search tool with filters that list documents by activity or time period. It also retrieves all the interactions that a user has had with specific people across different channels, including meetings.

A new Create page offers one-click buttons for creating different document types, featuring file types and templates for different documents such as event planning schedules.

New Actions also provide fast access to frequently used commands without having to open a file first. These include sharing documents or tagging files for follow-up with tasks using Office's To Do feature.

Microsoft, which delayed a price hike for its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 service this month, originally announced the updates to the product in November last year and began testing the updates in February. It plans to roll out the updates to all commercial and education customers by the end of the week.

The updates won't be available to users with Personal accounts, although Microsoft says that it is working on "similar enhancements".