New to Office 365 in December—Office Mobile for Windows 10 phone, updates for Apple and Android, Office 365 Planner preview and more

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.

It may be the holidays, but we’re still hard at work delivering a slate of new apps and features. New Windows 10 phones like the Lumia 950 now ship with Office Mobile. We also have updates for Office for Apple devices, Skype for Business for Android, a preview of Office 365 Planner and new management tools for IT.

Office Mobile now pre-installed on your new Windows 10 phone

Office Mobile is pre-installed on the new Lumia 950 to help you do more on the go. The Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar apps are touch-friendly and easy to use. Access your docs from anywhere, then share, review and add comments, so you won’t miss a beat when you’re on the move. You can even use the Office apps on your phone like a PC with Office support for Continuum.

Outlook—Use swipe gestures like Archive, Flag or Delete in Outlook Mail to triage email.

Word—Most Recently Used documents takes you right to the last file you were viewing on any device, so you can always pick up where you left off and review, edit or comment. Smart Lookup brings insights from the web right to your document.

Excel—The Excel app is built for touch, so editing data, filling in cells, copying formulas or inserting tables is a snap. Visualize your data in new ways and get to the insights that matter with beautiful new chart types like Sunburst and Treemap.

PowerPoint—Make quick edits to presentations on your way to a meeting. Then present right from your phone, with notes at your fingertips and inking to help you emphasize key points.

OneNote—Capture your thoughts, notes and to-dos with OneNote—your digital notebook. Add tags and pictures and share your notebooks with others to work together at the same time. Capture your ideas with just your voice by telling Cortana to take a note.

Skype for Business—Skype for Business helps you stay connected with your team while you’re on the move, using instant messaging, audio and video. High quality full-screen video and the ability to view shared content, including PowerPoint presentations, ensures a rich and immersive meeting experience. Set up Voicemail and Call-Forwarding and never miss a call.

Office Mobile + Continuum—Continuum is a new Windows 10 feature that allows you to use your phone like a PC. When you connect your phone to a larger screen, keyboard and mouse, your Office Mobile apps scale up so you can work on Office documents like you would on a PC*. While using Office on a larger screen, you can continue to use your phone and other mobile apps separately for multitasking.

Cortana and Office 365 Integration—Earlier this year, we added the ability for Cortana in Windows 10 to connect to Office 365 so she can help you accomplish more at work. By connecting with your Office 365 work account, Cortana can proactively help you prepare for upcoming meetings, pull together information about the people you are meeting with and their relevant documents. Now this integration is available on Windows 10 phones, so you can be more productive with less effort, even on the go.

*Editing in Word, Excel and PowerPoint with Continuum for phones will require an Office 365 subscription, but is available to try without Office 365 through March 31, 2016.

New in Office across Apple and Android

OpenDocument Format (ODF) support in Office 2016 for Mac and Office for iOS—We added support for ODF text, presentation and spreadsheet files so users can open and view more file types with Office applications when working on their Mac, iPad or iPhone.

Quick screen captures in Office 2016 for Mac—Right from Word, PowerPoint or Excel, you can now take a screen capture of any open app—or clip a portion of the screen and insert the image into your document, presentation or spreadsheet. Learn more here.

Custom citations in Word 2016 for Mac—In addition to default citation options, you can now add custom citation styles from external sources, like BibWord, for the creation of bibliographies in additional formats. Learn more here.

Skype for Business for Android—Skype for Business is now available for Android devices. Users will be more productive on their Android devices with a simplified UI for enhanced In-Call and In-Meeting experiences, new dashboard, one-touch meeting join and full-screen video. IT admins will also benefit from new support for additional security and authentication mechanisms like modern authentication and multi-factor authentication.

Office 365 Planner preview now available

Earlier this year, we announced Office 365 Planner and this week we started rolling out the Office 365 Planner preview to commercial Office 365 First Release customers.

Planner is a new app in Office 365 that helps teams easily organize and structure their work to get more done. Teams can create new plans, organize and assign tasks, set due dates and update status in a few simple steps. Planner makes it easy for team members to work together. Users can attach files to tasks and have conversations around tasks. Planner’s visual dashboards and email notifications keep everyone informed on the overall progress of their initiative.

All Office 365 Enterprise Plans, Business Essentials and Business Premium customers are eligible for the Planner preview. We expect this worldwide rollout to be complete over the next several weeks. Join First Release today to get a first look at Office 365 Planner preview. We would love to hear your feedback.

New Admin tools for IT

We made it easier for IT admins to manage Office 365 Groups and Groups data. For improved compliance controls, admins can now perform eDiscovery and litigation hold on a group’s mailbox. And coming soon, admins will be able to create groups with rule-based memberships using the Azure Management Portal. Learn more about these recent innovations and more here.

Two weeks ago, we announced the availability of new controls for Office 365 admins to assign access to Sway as individuals or groups. IT admins can now also control which third-party content sources (such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter) are enabled in Sway’s Insert tab for users in their organization. Learn more about these recent advancements to Sway here.

Wow, it has been quite a year for Office 365! We launched Office 2016 for Windows, Office 2016 for Mac, Sway and Office365 Groups. We delivered new and significantly improved apps across Android, iOS and Windows, and kept right on going with new innovations like PowerPoint Designer, Morph and our new enterprise E5 offering. As we close out 2015, we are grateful for our customers and Office Insiders for their support and feedback. And we’re looking forward to 2016 and more innovation to come!

—Kirk Koenigsbauer