Month: September 2018

Microsoft

The perpetually licensed version of the desktop Office apps, branded Office 2019, was released today. It's available as a one-time purchase for volume-licensed commercial customers. A consumer release will come in the next few weeks.

Office 2019 is supported on Windows 10—exclusively; no Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 support is available—and the three most-recent versions of macOS (that is, today's release of 10.14, 10.13, and 10.12).

Enlarge / Even searches on Bing will show organizational results, in a section above the regular Web results. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is shaking up the search boxes found in Bing, Office, Windows, Teams, and everywhere else it shows up in productivity apps. Under the common banner "Microsoft Search" the plan is to provide a consistent, unified view of search results that encompasses not just your own documents and emails but also your organization's content and conversations.

With the change, the search bar will become more prominent, with consistent behavior wherever it appears. This will include new features such as automatic suggestions—merely clicking the search box will present personalized results, such as documents you've edited recently or contacts you email regularly—and the ability to search for commands within the application. This means that instead of hunting through ribbons and dialog boxes, you'll be able to search for an application function and activate it from the search results.

The new search will subsume Windows search and show local files among its results. Greater value will be experienced by organizations using Microsoft 365. When signed into an Office 365 account, search results will include documents in SharePoint or OneDrive, conversations in Teams or Yammer, and contacts from the company directory, even when performing a search from Bing. Eventually, Microsoft plans to offer third-party data sources, too.

Enlarge / Even searches on Bing will show organizational results, in a section above the regular Web results. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is shaking up the search boxes found in Bing, Office, Windows, Teams, and everywhere else it shows up in productivity apps. Under the common banner "Microsoft Search" the plan is to provide a consistent, unified view of search results that encompasses not just your own documents and emails but also your organization's content and conversations.

With the change, the search bar will become more prominent, with consistent behavior wherever it appears. This will include new features such as automatic suggestions—merely clicking the search box will present personalized results, such as documents you've edited recently or contacts you email regularly—and the ability to search for commands within the application. This means that instead of hunting through ribbons and dialog boxes, you'll be able to search for an application function and activate it from the search results.

The new search will subsume Windows search and show local files among its results. Greater value will be experienced by organizations using Microsoft 365. When signed into an Office 365 account, search results will include documents in SharePoint or OneDrive, conversations in Teams or Yammer, and contacts from the company directory, even when performing a search from Bing. Eventually, Microsoft plans to offer third-party data sources, too.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

I ended last year’s review of macOS High Sierra by lamenting its invisibility but praising the much-needed work it did on the macOS foundation. There weren’t a lot of ways to tell that a Mac was running High Sierra instead of Low Sierra, but Apple quietly replaced the file system and the system’s window server and added (and later finalized) official support for external graphics, among a bunch of other tweaks. The yearly release cycle just kept Apple from actually building a whole lot of new features on top of that foundation.

Mojave, macOS version 10.14, takes the opposite approach. It still does some foundation-laying, especially around iOS apps, and it finishes up a few things that didn’t quite get finished in High Sierra. But it also includes the biggest and most consequential changes to the Mac’s user interface, the desktop, and Finder that we’ve seen in years; some brand-new apps ported over from iOS; new automation features; an overhauled App Store; and significant improvements to small but frequently-used actions like taking screenshots or using Quick Look.