Introduction and before Office 2016
A couple of years ago, when Microsoft suggested that Office users would see new features in the cloud first, this seemed to apply to the server products like Exchange and SharePoint. Those are cloud services where Microsoft can do the usual cloud experimentation of trying a new feature with a group of users and seeing how well it works before making it widely available.
That's the same 'flighting' process that's happening with Windows 10 – first the product team, then other Microsoft employees, and then volunteers try out the features before they're released to the public.
For Office 365 that's the First Release program, and increasingly it includes new features in the Office applications as well. If you've been using Office 2013 with an Office 365 subscription, you will already have some of the features that are new to other Office 2016 users, like being able to record what you're doing on your computer and include that in a PowerPoint presentation (because that was added to PowerPoint 2013 as an update).
And if you've been using the Office Online web apps that are part of OneDrive and Office 365 business subscriptions, the Tell Me and Smart Lookup features in Office 2016 will also seem rather familiar.
Before Office 2016
In fact, Office Online first got the Tell Me interface for finding specific features in January 2014, in what was then called the Word Web app, and in April 2014 it arrived for Excel. Tell Me works in the same way in Office 2016 as it does in Office Online – start typing what you want to do (which can be a common word like 'horizontal' rather than a technical term like 'orientation') and you get a short menu of matching features.
Some of the tools are more immediate in the online version – typing 'how many words' gets you a link to the Word Count dialog in both Word 2016 and Word Online, but Word Online also shows a fly-out with the number of words directly.
It's not surprising that Tell Me showed up in Office Online first, and not just because the Office team can experiment with features more easily in a cloud service that's getting updates every couple of months anyway. The Office Online apps have fewer features than the desktop Office programs (although they're getting more with every update), so building Tell Me would have been easier for a smaller set of features.
The Bing Insights feature (which is what Smart Lookup used to be called) is also an obvious thing to put in the web apps first (it was added to Word Online in December 2014), because you have to be online to look up information from words in your document in the first place. Like the Office 2016 programs, Office Online uses the rest of your document to get more accurate results when you look up a word, and shows information from Wikipedia and other sources in the Insights bar at the side.
There are some features that only work online, which is why Word 2016 hasn't quite caught up with Word Online. If you put an image containing text into a Word document, you won't find that text when you search the document. But if you save the document to OneDrive, the text in the picture will be recognised and indexed (although not immediately) and you'll see it if you search inside the document in Word Online.
Office freebies
What you get for free with Office Online
The list of Office Online apps is the same as the Office Home & Student line-up: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus Outlook.com instead of Outlook, but obviously, the web apps don't have all the features their Office 2016 equivalents include.
All the basics are there, and some of the more sophisticated options too. In Word Online, you don't just have the Find tool, you also have Find and Replace – and you can open it with the same Ctrl-H keyboard shortcut as used in desktop Word. AutoCorrect will capitalise the first word in a sentence or turn two hyphens into a long dash.
The Format Painter tool is there, for copying formatting from one selection to another. You can right click to open the Office 'mini bar' of commands, set the indent and line spacing for a paragraph or the margins for a page, use headers, footers and footnotes, insert a page break, change a document from portrait to landscape format, or collaborate on a document, either in real-time or using comments.
Missing features
There are plenty of small features from Word 2016 that you won't find in Word Online, like the ribbon tool and keyboard shortcut that lets you change the case of a word, or the tools that insert the date or a screenshot of any of your open windows into the document. The bigger features that are missing are the DTP-style options: choosing a document theme, inserting text boxes, shapes and Smart Art, creating a table of contents and an index, or printing letters and envelopes. The mail merge features aren't there either.
PowerPoint Online started as a tool for viewing slides but it's added a lot of editing features. You can now select, multi-select, move, resize or delete objects – and you get the same Smart Guides to help you line them up, or move them off the slide while you're working on something underneath them. You can create shapes and Smart Art, create, edit and format tables, including resizing rows and columns, or apply a theme. There are far fewer options for transitions and animations though.
Excel Online has a good selection of features, including a wide range of functions – and even PivotTables – but it has few of the data modelling or business intelligence features of Excel 2016. You can open a worksheet with VBA macros or PowerView visualisations but you can't run the macros or view the PowerView itself, though you can still see the rest of the spreadsheet.
You can hide and unhide columns, use Ctrl-G to jump t0 a specific cell and see the same handy formulae (sum, average, and so on) right in the status bar. You can create charts, but not shapes and Smart Art, and you don't get the handy Recommended Charts suggestions where Excel tries to pick the most helpful chart type.
And if you use Office add-ins, they work with the Office Online apps as well as in the desktop version of Office; in fact there are many add-ins that are just for Office Online.
Progressing quickly
Some of the Office features will never come to Office Online – although if you want to analyse data in your worksheets, the free Power BI service will put it into charts and tables and dashboards just as effectively as Excel 2016. The biggest flaw currently is the 5MB file size limit for spreadsheets.
But Office Online is also adding features fast – six months ago you couldn't copy the format of a paragraph or change the orientation of a page in Word Online. It's never going to replace Office for the power user, but you might be surprised by how much of Office 2016 you can already use free, online.
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