Microsoft typically highlights each month's updates to Microsoft 365 at the end of the month, but with the holiday season inching closer, the highlights for December have already been published. Despite only being halfway into the month, there have been a handful of welcome additions to many Office apps, some of which have been previously reported.
These include the new dark mode for the Word, PowerPoint, and Excel apps on macOS Mojave, which was first made available to Insiders in the Fast Ring at the end of October. The new theme will be rolling out to all users over the coming weeks alongside a refreshed UI. A design refresh has also hit Outlook for iOS, refining the interface and making the app more colorful.
Also this month, Microsoft announced live subtitles and captions for PowerPoint presentations (and Skype). In PowerPoint, the feature will be able to recognize 12 spoken languages and render text in over 60, and it will use AI to provide more contextually-relevant and accurate captions on the fly. This will be available on Windows 10, Mac, and PowerPoint Online starting next month.
Still in PowerPoint, you can now reuse slides from your other presentations and even from others in your organization. AI also plays a role here, recommending relevant slides for the presentation you're creating. Microsoft AI and Microsoft Graph also work together as part of a new feature in Word which gives you access to acronym definitions right within the app. Whenever you see an acronym you don't know, you can head over to the Review tab to get suggestions for what it might mean. Both of these features are now available to all Office 365 subscribers.
Other updates include new security features in Microsoft Bookings as well as integrations into Teams, Skype for Business, and third-party payments apps. Teams also has new Graph APIs to make it easier to create new teams, and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 will now store files uploaded to the service in SharePoint for added security and compliance.
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