Test Center: Preview Office 2016

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In Office 2016, Microsoft has -- more so than anything else -- focused on the workplace experience, such as teams, mobility, meetings, content co-creation and intelligence.

And with Outlook 2016, all these themes come together to create a much improved and more versatile email and communications hub than we have ever seen before in Office.

With this latest version of Outlook what you’ll notice is Microsoft has not changed the UI much at all. But if you look closely you’ll notice what it calls a Tell Me query box at the top Windows title bar. This query box is designed to help you get more out of Outlook.

The Tell Me query box is also available inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Also improved in Outlook 2016 is the way it handles attachments. Microsoft has taken the history feature from File Save/Open menu and applied it to attachment menu inside Outlook. That means no more hunting for that file you just closed and wanted to email. Outlook now surfaces the most recent attachments at the top of the drop-down menu.

And to help you fight back the landslide of daily email, Microsoft has added a feature called Clutter inside Outlook. The tool moves low priority messages out of your inbox and into a folder called -- you guessed it -- Clutter.

Microsoft says Clutter works over time analyzing your Outlook inbox workflow. Once it determines the messages you're most likely to ignore, it moves those messages to your Clutter folder inside Outlook.

Microsoft is also putting a big emphasis on team collaboration. And nowhere do you find Microsoft pushing that strategy harder than with Outlook.

In Outlook now you can create and manage public or private Groups. Office Groups allow you to create custom email distribution lists and share files in a Group SharePoint or OneDrive cloud locker.

Group members can keep tabs on group activity, access conversation history, and view version histories of files.

As we get closer to the official Office 2016 launch, look for deep hooks into Skype for Business. The Office app, which replaces Lync, will be central to group meetings.

The new Office 2016 public preview is now available for download. The public preview is available for both Office 365 subscribers and non-subscribers -- and both home users and enterprise users.

Office 2016 is compatible with Windows 7, 8 and Windows 10 PCs, laptops and tablets. You can expect Office 2016 suite for Windows desktops to ship in fall 2015.

PUBLISHED MAY 14, 2015