Microsoft: We’ve given Office.com this big update | ZDNet

Microsoft is rolling its revamped Office.com to its business and education customers with a new-look Home screen, improved search and the new Create pane. 

Microsoft unveiled the revamp of its Office.com portal and Office app for Windows in November at its Ignite conference and is now ready to show it to customers. Customers should see the new experience after logging in to their Microsoft Account, Microsoft says in a blogpost.    

The Office app and Office.com web portal are meant to help users quickly switch between Word, OneNote, Excel and and other Office apps to more easily find recently used documents stored on a local machine, in OneDrive, or SharePoint. They’re the successors to “My Office”. 

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The changes are aimed at boosting worker productivity and reducing the mental load of deciding which app is the most appropriate to create a particular type or content and remembering where content was stored, be it locally, in the cloud, email or in an app. 

The new Home screen uses Microsoft 365 to anticipate relevant files a person needs and at the top of the screen are Recommended Actions based on recent @mentions, To Do list items, and upcoming meetings. It also features a Quick Access section to help find documents being worked on.

There’s also a new My Content pane that aims to help users find various file types, regardless of where it’s stored, or how it was shared. There are “Browse by” views to help find attachments, meeting records, Loops and other files associated with colleagues and meetings. 

My Content offers new filters for people and meetings. Clicking on People displays cards of work contacts and documents related to them while the Meetings button brings up content related to meetings. It returns files regardless of whether it was stored locally, in email, or an app like Teams. Microsoft reckons it’s better than Quick Access because it returns all a person’s content rather than just recent activity. 

The revamped online experience includes a new Create page to help users quickly create content from any of their Office apps. Users can click the Create button on the left panel to open a new document or the template tool which suggests template options that could be used in numerous apps. 

Microsoft says it working on “similar enhancements” for people using Office.com and the Office app through a personal Microsoft Account. It plans to announce more updates in the coming months.