While the focus of attention has been all around Windows 9, Microsoft is also preparing Office 16 and even though the company hasn’t shared much, today new screenshots from an “Office Technical Preview” build shed some light on the features coming in the next version of the popular suite of office applications.

According to a report from The Verge, Microsoft’s Office 16 will include a new black theme. The new darker theme isn’t the default and users can always switch to the light gray, dark gray, or white theme as they like. Apparently this new addition was a highly requested feature from Office 2013 as users find the black theme a lot better on the eyes.

Tell me is another addition coming in Office 16. “Tell me” is a feature already found in Microsoft’s Office Online apps and helps users to quickly discover features and find “how-to guides” to get work done faster. This is very similar to what Clippy used to do, but this is a simple search box that lives in top of the document with a bulb icon on the right.

There is also a new feature that automatically rotate images in the correct orientation using the camera metadata. Users can always change the image rotation manually with a simple option after the image is inserted in the documents.

Alongside changes to the popular Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; Outlook for Office 16 will be improving sync options to download 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, or 14 days of emails, which will make Outlook a lot lighter in the computer as current version only downloads one month minimum.

Overall Office 16 looks the same as the existing version, the new features shown today are very light to what users are expecting from a brand new version. And the one significant change that still doesn’t show up is the touch-friendly version of Office for Windows. We’ve seen screenshots from a leaked version, however the new images do not show any sign.

It’s said that Microsoft is currently distributing the early bits of Office 16 to partners and testers, but there is no word of a public preview for anyone to try.

Source The Verge