Home Microsoft 365 Updates Microsoft 365 and Teams update 13th – 20th February 2021…and we dip...

Microsoft 365 and Teams update 13th – 20th February 2021…and we dip a toe in Xbox news

21 February 2021

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It’s time for our hand-picked updates from the 13th – 20th February 2021 across Microsoft 365. We’ll start with what’s delayed then look across Office, SharePoint and Teams as well as dip our toe in Xbox news.

Generally, these updates look at topics of interest to end users and those supporting them, such as team/site owners, super users, champions and trainers.

Delays

I don’t start here to be negative, these snippets about delays are a great reminder of what’s coming soonish:

Teams desktop app for Mac update: Include computer sound in a meeting. Now due late March to early April:

Change in display of hierarchical sensitivity labels in Teams. Now due mid-March to mid-April:

New Teams meeting lobby setting – only invited users join directly. Now dueearly to mid-March:

Get a Meet now meeting link in Teams. Now due late February to mid-March:

Forms

Text formatting (bold, italic, underline) available in Microsoft Forms – You will soon be able to use text formatting (bold, italics, and underline) in Forms surveys and quizzes differentiate and emphasise content. This update will rollout automatically. Your experience will be consistent with other Office 365 products, you will be able to format text by using either a floating tool bar or keyboard shortcuts.

In the editing canvas of the form, you can also use the text format toolbar inline whenever they are composing text content:

This rollout has already started and should be complete ~~by early-February~~ in March (a little later for government customers).

Microsoft are introducing a change in public groups that affects Microsoft Forms users. Currently, all users in an organisation can access a shared form in a public group (Microsoft Office 365 Group marked as public). All users can edit the form and view response data without first joining the public group. After this change, users will need to join and become a member of a public group in order to access shared forms within the group.

This feature rollout will begin mid-March and should be complete by late March 2021.

Office

Dictation in Word and Outlook improvements – this feature update improves upon the user dictation experience in Word and Outlook (Windows and Mac) with the addition of the Dictation toolbar, voice commands and auto punctuation support. The new dictation toolbar makes it easier for you to create, edit content with your voice and change settings like Auto punctuation, Profanity filter and Spoken language.

Steps:

Enable dictation by clicking Dictate in the toolbar:

After clicking Dictate and Allowing microphone access dictation is enabled and begins listening:

To turn on Auto punctuation, Profanity filter, Spoken language, click Dictation Settings on the toolbar:

To enable Dictation across all platforms you must:

Have a microphone
Have Office for Windows 2102 (13616.10000) or later
Be signed into a Microsoft 365 account
Have a stable internet connection

This feature rollout will begin mid-March and is expected to be complete by early April 2021.

Learn more about this feature.
Learn more about dictation in Word.

Outlook

Outlook on the web: update in how users access Mail, Calendar, People, and To Do – Microsoft are adding an app bar to Outlook on the web. which changes how you access Mail, Calendar, People and To Do functions. You can also launch Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote on the web, Yammer, and other Microsoft 365 applications directly from the app bar along the left side of the folder pane.

Existing:

New:

This feature rollout will start early March and should be complete by late March 2021.

SharePoint

Introducing a SharePoint app bar that features global navigation – SharePoint modern communication and team sites will soon feature the SharePoint app bar which provides quick access to customisable global navigation as well as other intranet resources. The SharePoint app bar makes important content and resources easily accessible for users on these sites, regardless of where they might be in SharePoint.

You access the SharePoint app bar from the upper left-hand side of the browser on the SharePoint start page and throughout modern SharePoint sites. The SharePoint app bar improves global wayfinding and dynamically displays personalized content for sites, news, and files:

The app bar features customisable global navigation that leads to important intranet resources. Personalised content, news and files, is driven by Microsoft Graph and cannot be customised. This feature rollout will begin early March 2021 for most of use and only take a couple of weeks.

Supporting Microsoft posts:

Teams

Microsoft are updating the file sharing and access control experience in Microsoft Teams to make it similar to the experience with other Microsoft 365 apps.

With this update, when users share a file from within Teams (desktop/web), they will have the option to create sharing links that provide access to:

anyone
people with existing access
people within your organisation
specific people, including those in a 1:1 chat, group chat, or channels.

Teams honours the sharing controls defined in SharePoint. For example, if external sharing is disabled in SharePoint, then it is disabled in Teams as well. The default file link permission in Teams will be the same that is set at tenant level, unless that setting has been overridden at the respective SharePoint site level.

This feature will roll out mid-March to mid-April 2021. Learn more about sharing files in Teams here: blog.

Word

Feature Update: Modern comments in Word for Windows and Mac – Microsoft are rolling out a new comments experience in Word with improved keyboard shortcuts as well as improved @mentions and notifications. This experience unifies how comments work across Word, Excel, and PPT. When this has rolled out you will see the modern comments experience, which allows you to @mention and post comments. Co-authors cannot see your comments before they are complete. You can even respond to comments directly from an email notification.

The new experience shows comments to the right of the page by default. This default focused view hides all resolved comments so you can focus on active comments. The Comments button in the upper right corner of your Word window lets you switch to the Comments pane. This shows all comments in the document including resolved comments.

This feature rollout will begin February for some users and April 2021 for most of us.

Text predictions in Word Windows – Text suggestions during typing. Just press Tab to accept it or continue typing to ignore:

This feature is only English for now and is on by default. Managed in File > Account > Manage Settings. Rollout has begun for some customers and should be fully available by early March 2021.

Xbox

Xbox Wireless Headset – looks like the easiest way to get a premium audio experience with your Xbox. I especially like the retractable mic and am looking forward to the first hands on reviews…will it be good enough for work and play? I have a pair of Surface headphones and if these are anywhere near as good (sure, I appreciate these are less than half the price) I’ll be getting a set and will report back. Pre-order now for release on 16th March 2021 for £89.99.

FPS Boost on Xbox Series X|S – is another example of Microsoft’s commitment to backward compatibility for Xbox Series X and S. They are going back over ‘previous gen’ titles and have boosted the frame rates on games like Far Cry 4, New Super Lucky’s Tale, Sniper Elite 4, UFC 4, and Watch Dogs 2…and more are coming soon. Apparently, they have done a great job…learn more here.

That’s it for this week, remember to subscribe to Super Simple 365 on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and your podcast player to get your weekly 365 update.