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Today marks the general availability of Office 2016 for Windows, a suite of desktop applications that together with new mobile and web apps pushes Microsoft's new vision for PC-based productivity. Office 2016 is available immediately to Office 365 subscribers, as well as to individuals who would prefer to buy the software in standalone form. "We see Office 2016 as being just as important as the first release of Office," Microsoft group program manager Shawn Villaron told me in a briefing last week. "In the early days, Office was about bringing really important tools together to empower the individual for personal productivity. That was the way people wanted to work at that time. And for 20 to 30 years, Office fit right in. Today, things are changing. More people collaborate on work as groups and teams, so Office 2016 represents the change from personal productivity to team productivity."

Crafting the right content takes time and attention. To help you minimize the distractions, we created a Read Mode layout in Word. Read Mode is an option in the View menu that hides toolbars and menus to leave more room for the pages themselves. www.office.com/setup The best part is that you don't need to trade functionality for simplicity. The most common reading tools are built right in to Read Mode, and some helpful ones have been added in Word 2013. It's still easy to add comments, define words, copy or highlight text, change layouts, or search with Bing. But now you can also enlarge charts or images to full-screen with a double click, and you can zip around the document with the Navigation Pane. And not to show off, but Word developers even built Read Mode to remember where you stop reading. You can shut down your computer knowing that you can open the document right at the same place the next time you turn on your computer.

WHAT IS MICROSOFT PROJECT? www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Project is a flexible tool for project portfolio management (PPM) and daily work, delivered through Office 365. The first place in this category of products is held by Wrike which has a total score of 9.8/10 and is the winner of our Best Project Management Software Award for 2016. You can try out Wrike for free here. You can also compare Microsoft Project with Wrike and see which one is better for your company. Microsoft Project enables businesses to get started, manage project portfolio investments, and deliver successfully with the intended business value. Microsoft Project Professional gives businesses a powerful, visually enhanced way to efficiently manage a wide range of their projects and programs. From meeting important deadlines, to choosing the right resources and empowering your office teams, Project Professional delivers new as well as intuitive experiences to plan, manage, and collaborate with various individuals, teams, and the enterprise. OVERVIEW OF MICROSOFT PROJECT BENEFITS Arguably one of the best among the currently available project management tools, Microsoft Project is the tool for any company that is tired of trying to boost productivity with whiteboard scribblings, post-it notes, as well as scraps of paper. The tool deals with complexity in a very simple manner. While the tool has an impressively huge range of capabilities, it is relatively easy for any user to get it to do exactly what he or she needs. Microsoft Project is designed by people who have managed real-life projects and know that some things and processes are always changing. Thus with this tool, adding new tasks or revising the organization of a project midway through will be an easy thing to do. It is extremely intuitive and offers great balance of usability and complexity. Project is used in various industries including manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, construction, retail, financial services, government, a

The AutoCorrect feature in Word 2016 fixes hundreds of common typos and spelling errors on-the-fly. You have to be quick to see it in action. For example, in Word you can't type the word mispell (with only one s). That's because AutoCorrect fixes that typo the split second that you press the spacebar. AutoCorrect also converts common text shortcuts into their proper characters. For example, type (C) and AutoCorrect properly inserts the © copyright symbol. Ditto for (TM) for the trademark. Typing - -> is translated into an arrow, and even :) becomes a happy face.

Inserting images in a word file exemplifies the true meaning of the word document. It helps the document to be more artistic as it includes images and drawings. With the help of images, the word document can be understood in a better way.Whenever we wish to insert a picture/image in a word document, we can copy-paste the image from any directory to the word file but inserting through the conventional method must be preferred.

Have you seen the new Microsoft Forms? One of the most popular articles on my blog in the last 12 months was related to its predecessor - Excel Surveys. Not only did that post get a lot of views, but it also got a lot of comments from people with questions about the features of Excel Surveys, or more importantly for some, the features it did not have. You can still use Excel Surveys, but Microsoft are in the process of transitioning to something better - Microsoft Forms. This version includes automatic grading and built-in student feedback. Here's what you need to know.

In this tutorial, you will lean a quick way to calculate percentages in Excel, find the basic percentage formula and a few more formulas for calculating percentage increase, percent of total and more. Calculating percentage is useful in many areas of life, whether it is restaurant tipping, reseller commission, your income tax or interest rate. Say, you've been lucky enough to get a 25% off promotion code on a new plasma TV. Is this a good deal? And how much will you eventually have to pay?

Part of the thrill of working for the Office Division is the opportunity to tackle thorny business issues on behalf of our customers while providing them with a road map for the future. That may be why an interesting article caught my attention this week. In it, the author examined some of the investments Microsoft is making in the unified communications space. While I didn't agree with all of the conclusions it contained, the article certainly underscored the interest in communications and collaboration and how to make people more productive.

"Faux Columns" by Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits discusses "[a] simple way to make CSS columns appear equal in length, regardless of the content that they contain." This technique requires a good amount of skill in positioning elements on a page and understanding the nuances of the background image. Found at: Zeldman and A List Apart I'd like to try it, but don't anticipate using it any time in the near future..

This article, written for the Design Shack website, shows how to code for multiple columns using CSS3. I expect my first site to have just two columns, but adding a third may be in the cards in the future. I expect to impement these ideas in the near future.

Change is always welcome in today's world as that is always an opportunity to better the present condition. In the world of technology change is even more welcome as technology is advancing in leap...

April's Customer of the Month is Robert Aichele, Senior Manager, Store Communications at Jamba Juice. I've been at Jamba since 2009 managing internal communication, primarily store and field communication, with a hand in some broader projects connecting our strategic vision with the managers in the field. Our Yammer network debuted in 2011, catching on with a small group and then expanding quickly to include our entire Support Center. It was so popular we extended it to our company-owned store managers later that year, and it plateaued happily there for several months as an interesting tool to share ideas and problem solve operational issues when we needed to hear diverse perspectives quickly.

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram. Linking data to Visio diagrams was first introduced in 2007 and has been overwhelmingly popular. We've improved the functionality since then and the capability has become increasingly more powerful. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. There's a simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to your diagram. Once you've linked data to diagram shapes, apply data graphics to shapes-text, data bars, icons, or color by value conditional formatting-to visually display numerical data. The important point here is that data-linked diagrams are dynamic; the data graphics change when data is refreshed in the source (like Excel).

Based in Chicago, Illinois, United is one of the largest airlines in the world. To improve enterprise content management (ECM), United wanted to build communities around the products and services it delivers to customers. The airline initially deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and subsequently migrated to SharePoint Server 2010, which United developed into an enterprise platform for ECM and e-discovery, co-locating approximately 1 terabyte of content for the enterprise. In 2012, the airline deployed SharePoint Server 2013 for a variety of projects-including a service catalog that 87,000 employees rely on to search for and order products from the IT department. By using SharePoint Server 2013, United has also simplified content management-the amount of time required to enter a new item into the catalog has plummeted from two months to a few hours.

Small businesses have enough to focus on without having to spend time and energy worrying about email, data storage or backup servers. In fact, most small businesses don't know or understand what a server is. The good news is that in today's technology environment, they don't need to. This is because more small businesses are rapidly moving from outdated technology solutions to Web-based solutions to power their company, also known as "moving to the cloud." By moving to cloud solutions like Office 365, small businesses find they can concentrate their resources on growing their business rather than trying to solve technical issues. Large enterprises typically have entire divisions dedicated to supporting and keeping their IT infrastructure up and running. Even though small businesses don't have this luxury, they can still punch above their weight by choosing the enterprise-grade IT services in Office 365 to help solve their most top-of-mind business challenges.

May's Customer of the Month is Melanie Hohertz, Online Communications Lead, Cargill. I've been supporting Yammer as a work platform for Cargill for almost a year. We're early in our adoption, but it's been an amazing experience. I am learning, daily, how Yammer can change the way people and teams work and add value in a company that is more than 140,000 strong and spread throughout 65 countries. Our network will pass 10,000 members soon and already, you can't stump us on anything. From food to agriculture to financial and industrial products and services, Yammer is helping Cargill use what Cargill knows, and that's a lot. Yammer can connect people across silos based on organization, geography and hierarchy. I've seen customer reps talking directly to product management, and senior leaders listening to recently-hired employees. We have new ways to realize the power of our communities of practice to speed up ideation and action. Sure, we still have a long road ahead before Yammer is as ubiquitous and instinctive as e-mail, but we throw a heck of a YamJam, and the signal-to-noise ratio in our network is beautiful.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: With the release of Office 2016, you might wonder how you can get the latest version of Office if you a one-time purchase of Office 2013 or an existing Office 365 subscription. If you're not sure what version of Office you have, see What version of Office am I using? If you want to upgrade to Office 2016 from an Office 365 for business subscription, see How do I get the new Office 2016 apps using Office 365 for business? GET OFFICE 2016 USING AN OFFICE 365 SUBSCRIPTION OR A ONE-TIME PURCHASE OR OLDER VERSION OF OFFICE For Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscriptions If you want to install the 64-bit version or install Office in another language, follow the step-by-step instructions in Install Office on your PC or Mac. Otherwise, use the steps below to install Office 2016. Go to www.office.com/myaccount. Sign in with your Microsoft account. This is the account you associated with the version of Office you're trying to install. On My Office Account, select Install. The process to uninstall Office 2013 and install Office 2016 can take some time. When the installation completes, you'll see a welcome video that explains how to find your apps and start Office 2016. For a one-time purchase or older version of Office If you installed a one-time purchase of Office 2013, you can't upgrade directly from within the Office 2013 software. You'll need to either purchase one of the Office 2016 suites of products, such as Office Home & Student 2016, or purchase an Office 365 subscription. For more information about the different options available for purchasing Office 2016, see Choose your Office.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Good Morning America's "Boosting Your Business" segment, sponsored by Microsoft, provides entrepreneurs and small businesses with simple advice and tools to help them grow. On March 15, Good Morning America brought in Maxie McCoy, a career expert, to give tips and tricks to help businesses across the country be more productive and collaborative. To demonstrate some of these tips, Maxie visited WeWork, the hugely successful shared-office space startup, and talked about how the WeWork Creator Awards team can work together in a new way using Microsoft Teams, a new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Maxie gave the Creator Awards team advice on aligning their vision, delegating responsibility and communicating clearly within team workspaces. She showed them how Microsoft Teams creates a secure hub for teamwork, helping them communicate and collaborate more effectively. Unique vision and unquestionable talent has made the WeWork team into what it is today. Microsoft Teams gives them a new way to work together and continue to grow. Watch the segment now: Check out Microsoft Teams to see how your team can be more productive and collaborative as well. Download and read "The Ultimate Guide to Chat-Based Tools."

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Good Morning America's newest segment, "Boosting Your Business," sponsored by Microsoft Office, provides entrepreneurs with simple tips and tools to help grow their businesses. In this first segment, Good Morning America brought in Carol Roth, a small business expert and host of Microsoft's Office Small Business Academy, to visit a popular Chicago salon. Living out the American dream, Goran Cobanovski opened his own hair salon after arriving in the U.S. from Macedonia, where his flagship location now employs a team of 18 people and serves up to 50 clients a day. Carol gives Goran advice on employee engagement, delegating responsibilities and scheduling appointments. She shows him how Microsoft Bookings can make front-desk scheduling run more efficiently-creating happier customers. Microsoft Bookings is a new service as part of Office 365 that allows customers to book appointments online directly through your website or Facebook page. Unique vision and unquestionable talent made Goran's dream his reality. Microsoft Office will give him more free time to enjoy it. Register for the Office Small Business Academy webcast series to get more tips and tricks to help you start, grow and manage your business.