Help on minding your PowerPoint language in this week’s MS round-up
As its services tottered once more last week, the gang at Redmond kept themselves busy tinkering with Office while Intel announced some changes to graphics drivers in the post Windows 10 October 2018 Update world.
Microsoft continued the policy of continually updating its bread-and-butter productivity suite, Office 365, by whacking it repeatedly with an AI stick for collaboration purposes.
Word users will shortly be able to enjoy something Visual Studio-using devs have had for years. If you write to-do items (by, say, writing TODO: finish this), the word processor will automatically track them and allow writers to navigate back to the correct spot.
Kind of like the stuff programmers have had for years before it was fashionable to label everything as AI.
A neat twist, however, is the ability for Word to automatically email users @identified in a TODO with a link to throw them into the document at the place to get their stuff done.
Microsoft has also tipped machine learning secret sauce onto its venerable PowerPoint presentation builder. AI smarts will be deployed to tell users when wording is awkward or grammar incorrect and give “guidance on clarity and conciseness”.
Sadly, the AI assistance does not yet stretch as far as yelling at the user when a presentation winds up festooned with bullet points or exceeds 100 pages. We can but hope that AI, coupled with the audio smarts of Cortana, could detect when a presenter is simply reading out the slides and issue a polite cough. Or a small electric jolt via the clicker.
Microsoft was also chuffed to announce that new icons are on the way for its suite in a posting that will leave users who struggled to even connect to the cloudy service scratching their heads in bafflement at where the software giant is flinging its copious cash.
