What's New in Office 365 in June

Make private annotations on Word files in OneDrive

Have you ever annotated a word document in a shared OneDrive folder, only to find your annotations have been altered or removed the next time you log on? If so, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s now possible to create private copies of shared Word files, which will preserve your original annotations.

It’s very simply done. When you add ink to a shared document – by selecting a pen from the Draw tab – OneDrive will automatically create a private copy of your file. OneDrive also automatically saves your private files to the Private Copies folder in your OneDrive. And if you don’t have OneDrive, they’ll just get saved onto your device!

Share links to specific slides in PowerPoint

It’s now possible to share slide links in PowerPoint, which means you can direct colleagues to specific slides. Perhaps you need help with a slide and want a colleague to edit or revise its contents. Or you might just want to demonstrate what you’re working on. Either option is possible – you can nominate whether they’ll have edit privileges after selecting “Link to this Slide.”

Hold up. Where and how do I select “Link to this Slide”? It couldn’t be easier. Just right-click the slide you want to share and “Link to this Slide” will appear towards the bottom of the pop-up menu. Then you'll just need to decide if they can edit the slide, and copy the link. Paste the link into an email or Slack conversation and it'll take the recipient straight to the specified slide. Doing so will also give them access to the entire presentation.

Outlook to flag any file access issues for OneDrive and SharePoint links

“That link didn’t work. Can you send it again?” I’m sure we’ve all received an email of this variety. And look, while it’s not one of the bigger frustrations that can crop up during the average work day, it’d be nice if it never happened again. That’s precisely what this new Outlook update aims to do.

So, when OneDrive and SharePoint files are shared with email recipients, Outlook will alert you if there are any potential file access issues. If indeed there are, you can manage the permissions in a couple of straightforward ways. You can click on the link in Outlook and select “Links settings” or right-click the link and select "Manage Access".

Alongside this update, Outlook will now also shorten the URL of files inserted from OneDrive and SharePoint, making it so just the name of the inserted file is displayed. If you’d rather show the entire URL, simply right-click the link and select “Show Full URL”.

365 subscribers can access thousands of royalty-free images

Eager to add visual depth to your emails, presentations and documents? You’re in luck – Microsoft is giving Office 365 subscribers access to a library of thousands of royalty-free images. The offer currently extends to Office for Windows, PowerPoint for the web and SharePoint Online, however it’ll soon be opened up to other apps and platforms.

To give it a go, head to the Insert tab, select “Pictures” and then “Stock Images”. There are a few categories – Stock Images, Cutout People, Icons and Stickers. Make your selection(s) and hit “Insert.”

There are already stacks of images and icons to choose from, but the collections will be regularly updated with even more images.

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