As you can see in Figure 2, when I launch PowerPoint, the splash screen indicates that I am launching PowerPoint Office 365, not PowerPoint 2016. I got my copy of Office 2016 through my Office 365 subscription. So what's going on?Īs I dug a little bit further into the mystery, I began to notice a few things. Other Office applications proved to be just as similar to their Office 2016 counterparts. Figure 1: The top toolbar is Word 2019, and the bottom toolbar is Word 2016. The only really obvious difference between the two is that Word 2019 is missing the Dictate icon, but I am guessing that this is because it is running on a virtual machine with no sound card. To show you what I mean, take a look at Figure 1. As I poked around in Office 2019, however, I began to notice something: Office 2019 seemed nearly indistinguishable from Office 2016. After all, I have done that for most of the Office versions that have been released over the last 20 years. While there may be a few extra Office 2019 features that weren't initially disclosed, I still have not heard about anything new that is particularly noteworthy.ĭespite the lackluster list of new features, I still wanted to take the time to explore Office 2019 and write about what is new. The other possibility that I thought of was that more new features were coming, but Microsoft was not yet ready to disclose those features. Needless to say, the theory that Microsoft had decided to focus on something other than Word was incorrect. Outlook, for example, was said to be getting new contact cards, support for and a new focused Inbox feature. There were similarly brief descriptions for other Office applications. The information that I had received indicated that PowerPoint would be getting some new zoom capabilities and better support for 3-D images. With that in mind, I turned my attention to PowerPoint. One was that Microsoft had focused most of its attention on the other Office applications, not Word. Upon reading about the new features for the first time, I assumed that one of two things was happening. Previous versions of Office have included some really impressive new features, but the new features that had been disclosed for Word 2019 are basically just eye candy.

For example, I had read that Word was supposed to get a new dark-colored theme, an improved text-to-speech feature and various accessibility improvements.

One of the things that I had noticed leading up to the Office 2019 release is that the list of new features was really short. However, things played out quite a bit differently than expected. My plan for this column was to write about all of the cool new features that we can expect in the next Office release. Recently, I downloaded the preview release of Microsoft Office 2019.

Newest version of microsoft office