Since the start of the year Microsoft have released previews for the latest Office editions for both Desktop and Mobile. Mac and Windows users can access a preview of Office 2016, which sees a refreshed look for the suite while maintaining the keyboard and mouse optimisation. For those using Mac, this is a huge leap forwards from the current Office 2011 suite.

Some of the key benefits that we can now see from the full previews are:

• Improvements to the Outlook Application; Overall performance enhancement, a more robust search, adjusted colour theme to help readability of messages
• “Tell Me” feature; this has been available for the past year in the Office Web Apps, but has been brought to the desktop suite. This consists of a toolbar where you simply type what you want to do, and sensible suggestions will pop up for how you can achieve your task
• Data Loss Prevention features for Administrators with policy options around document authoring, and prevention measures against leaking both personal and sensitive information outside the company.

The full release of Office 2016 is expected later this year, and Office for Windows 10, featuring the mobile optimised applications, will come along with the Windows 10 release penciled in for the second half of 2015.

Microsoft also revealed that the current combined number of subscriptions to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal is now over 9.2 million, while commercial seats for Office 365 had increased by 88% compared to the same time a year ago.