Microsoft announced that starting April 21, Office 365 will undergo a complete transformation, becoming Microsoft 365. The change of name also corresponds to an extension of the functions, without prejudice to the two plans Microsoft 365 Personal is Microsoft 365 Family which will replicate the Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home proposals now on sale.
For those who currently have an Office 365 plan active, it will be automatically transferred to the new Microsoft 365 service. Prices will not change: € 69 per year for a Microsoft 365 Personal account, while for € 99 it will be possible to obtain Microsoft 365 Family and manage up to a maximum of 6 accounts. There are two main novelties of Microsoft 365 compared to Office 365: in the new package we find Family Safety is Teams for Consumers, which work alongside Office, OneDrive and Outlook.
Family Safety is a new application that allows you to stay in touch with your family members as well as check the level of use of digital services. It is therefore possible to keep track of which applications are used the most, and for how long, in the Windows, Xbox and Android environment, configuring for some users (such as children) time limits for their use. Microsoft Family Safety allows you to protect your family even offline: it is in fact possible to set notifications when a family member arrives or leaves a place, such as home, school or office, and obtain reports on the driving behavior of more family members inexperienced, to ensure greater peace of mind of parents and help them establish safe driving habits.
Teams for Consumers implements the functions underlying Teams, transporting them within the context of use typical of a consumer user and that of a family, promoting collaboration and dialogue with the different types of digital devices.
Microsoft also announced a number of general changes for its Office package-related services. The first update is Microsoft Editor, an AI-based service to improve your writing skills, available in 20 languages, including Italian, on Outlook.com and as an extension for the Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome browsers. The tool is currently available for a selection of languages also in Word. The basic features are available for free, while Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users will have access to advanced suggestions both regarding grammar and writing style.
Also PowerPoint Presenter Coach is enriched with new smart features, available exclusively for Microsoft 365 subscribers: Monotone Pitch returns real-time feedback on the tone of voice used during presentations, while Speech Refinement offers grammatical suggestions and how to formulate your speech more effectively. The two features will be available for the English language initially in free preview and then only for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
The PowerPoint experience is further enhanced thanks to a Designer update, the functionality that helps improve the creativity and layout of presentations, saving precious time. Microsoft 365 users will get exclusive access to over 8,000 images and 175 looped videos from the Getty Images library, as well as 300 new fonts and 2,800 new icons to create high-impact presentations. The new contents will also be usable in Word and Excel. Finally, Microsoft has introduced over 200 new premium templates for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Finally, Outlook introduces new features that will allow you to manage your agenda more effectively. By synchronizing your personal calendar with the company calendar it will be possible to show only the real availability, with the maximum guarantees of privacy with respect to the details of your personal appointments.
