NEW FEATURES/FIXES
You can find and follow all monthly Office insider new features and fixes (updates) on our blog. 👍🏻
February 28, 2020
Outlook
New Feature
Incident Notification for IT Admins
Microsoft 365 tenant global administrators and Office Apps Administrators will be notified about Outlook and O365 Exchange incidents affecting their users with a new right-side panel notification in Outlook for Windows.
Resolved Issue
- Addresses an issue that caused the “Last Modified” date on a file to be updated when adding an attachment to a mail or saving an attachment from a mail by dragging and dropping it (as opposed to via a menu).
PowerPoint
New Feature
Improved ink to shape diagramming experience
Draw better diagrams and have it convert so office object you can manipulate
Fixed issue
- Fixes an issue when multiple documents are open in PowerPoint from the same SharePoint library, only the first document opened will be scanned for Policy compliance.
Word
Resolved Issues
- Fixed an issue that when tabbing through a comment card, the focus on the comment edit box would not be visible.
- Inserting a control (such as a Text Content Control) in an equation then saving and opening the file results in an un-readable content error.
- Fixed an issue where saving a previously password protected file to a cloud storage would not work.
- Fixes an issue when multiple documents are open in Word from the same SharePoint library, only the first document opened will be scanned for Policy compliance.
Excel
Resolved issues
- Fixed an issue where text in a slicer isn’t scaled properly in Print Preview.
- Fixes an issue when multiple documents are open in Excel from the same SharePoint library, only the first document opened will be scanned for Policy compliance.
February 21, 2020
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, 
OneNote, 
Access, 
Project, 
Publisher and
Visio
New Feature
Pick the perfect color
Use hex color codes to choose exactly the color you want for your font, text highlight, and more.
Getting Started
- Open a file in one of the supported applications.
- For any property where you can define a color, click the appropriate button in the ribbon (such as the Font Color button) and click More Colors.
- In the Colors dialog box, click the Custom tab.
- Enter the Hex color value in the Hex box, for example, #0F4C81 or 444
Excel
New Features
Look above.
Notable Fixes
- Fixed an issue that users may have experienced when renaming pivot table measures.
- Fixed a performance issue that users may have experienced when using a VBA macro to clear the contents of a range.
- Fixed an issue that caused the UI to flash when users executed a macro that interacted with the ribbon.
- Fixed an issue where CSV files were loaded incorrectly when the first word in the file was TABLE.
- Fixed an issue where users may have experienced crashes when switching between two workbooks that had different zoom levels.
Outlook
New Features
Look above.
Notable Fixes
- Addressed an issue that caused users to be unable to open public folder messages when Outlook was left running overnight.
- Fixed a race condition where the ‘Allow’ and ‘Deny’ buttons on the permissions page are disabled during the authentication workflow of adding a Gmail account.
- Addressed an issue that caused Outlook to unexpectedly generate logging output in some scenarios, even when logging was turned off.
PowerPoint
New Features
Look above.
Notable Fixes
- When using Multichoice/Lookup/Managed-metadata properties with Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents and saving to a SharePoint Document Library, these properties were previously limited to 255 characters. When these properties exceeded 255 characters, such documents could not be saved. With this change, this limit has been increased to 2048 characters.
Word
New Features
Look above.
Notable Fixes
- Fixed an issue where comment cards don’t always get highlighted when a mouse pointer hovers over the comment card.
- During an active document co-authoring session, adding an image directly in to a comment card may result in the addition of a tag. This issue has been fixed.
February 14, 2020
Word
New Feature
Find Ink Editor in your drawing toolbox
Select Draw and then choose the Ink Editor pen to edit your document with your finger or a digital pen.
Get Started
Choose Draw and select the Ink Editor pen.
(If you don’t have a digital pen enabled device and have a touch device instead, choose Draw with Touch > Ink Editor pen.)
Things you can try:
- Circle to select text
- Cross out to delete text
- Apply highlighting
- Join words
- Split words
- Insert a word
- Make a new line
Resolved Issue
- Fixed an issue where pictures in documents lose transparency when exported to PDF.
Outlook
New Feature
New experience for captive wifi networks
Have you ever joined a wifi network that required a web page to sign in with? Outlook now detects this and helps you get connected.
Resolved Issues
- Addressed an issue that caused users to lose access to the “Free Busy Options” calendar permissions dialog.
- Fixed an issue that may result in the alert: “Sorry we’re having trouble opening this item” when opening some recurring meeting instances sent from a different time zone.
- Addressed an issue that could cause users to be unable to reopen a .msg file after dragging and dropping an attachment from that message.
- Fixed an issue where after uploading a file attachment from Outlook to OneDrive could result in the file name being changed if the attachment’s name contained parenthesis.
PowerPoint
Resolved Issue
- Fixed an issue that could result in a failure to save a document in PowerPoint or Word containing an Excel chart.
February 11, 2020
Look left, look right…XLOOKUP is here!
XLOOKUP is the successor to the iconic VLOOKUP function! It’s named for its ability to look both vertically and horizontally (yes it replaces HLOOKUP too!). In its simplest form, XLOOKUP needs just 3 arguments to perform the most common exact lookup (one fewer than VLOOKUP). Let’s consider its signature in the simplest form:
XLOOKUP(lookup_value,lookup_array,return_array)
- lookup_value: What you are looking for
- lookup_array: Where to find it
- return_array: What to return
Excel
Ask a question about your data
Got a question about your data? Not sure how to get started? Ideas looks for patterns in your data to provide intelligent suggestions and visualizations. You can now type your question into the input box and let Ideas find the answer. Give it try.
1. From an open spreadsheet, select a cell in a data range.
2. From the Home tab, click the Ideas button.
3. In the input box, type a specific question or select one from the drop-down menu.
Ideas will quickly answer your question with formulas, charts, or pivot tables. Ideas works best when your data is formatted as an Excel table with a single header row at the top.
Get more insight from your data
Need more information? Get a deeper understanding of your data using the new data profiling views in Power Query Editor. Quickly drill down into details and take action. Using the different views, you can drill down into your data and identify unique values, errors, and duplications. Try it out.
1. In Power Query Editor, create or open an existing query.
2. On the View tab, check Column quality, Column distribution, and Column profile.
3. Select a column from the top pane. Power Query Editor will display more details in the lower panes.
4. Hover over the data to get more information including suggested actions, like remove duplicates.
Outlook
Help protect data in your group
You asked for it! Keep your emails compliant with your organization’s information protection policies by applying sensitivity labels.
You no longer need to manually apply encryption, or manually insert headers or footers into emails to state how sensitive they are, for example. Now, all you need to do is apply a Sensitivity label (like “General” or “Highly Confidential”), and the Microsoft Information Protection platform will do the rest (based on policies IT administrators create).
How to enable the feature
- In the Message tab in Outlook, click the Sensitivity button, and choose the label you want.
Access
Improved query-based editing features
We’ve heard your feedback. We need to make it easier to edit queries. We’ve made the following improvements:
- Query Designer – Added more features to the right-click options, including Open, Table Design, Size to Fit, and Hide Table.
- SQL view – Added find and replace.
- Relationships window – Added multiple table select, table-edge adjustment, and mouse wheel scroll.
February 7, 2020
Access
New Feature
Be more productive working in Query Designer, SQL view, and the Relationships window
Right-click a table to open, design, size, and hide it. Search and replace text in SQL View. Select multiple tables in the Relationships window.
Resolved Issues
- This update fixes an issue where using an ADODB. Recorder object in VB code may incorrectly report an error.
- This update fixes an issue that can cause Microsoft Access to fail to identify an Identity Column in a linked SQL Server table, which can cause rows to be reported as deleted incorrectly.
Word
Resolved Issued
- Updating and scrolling through a table of contents may sometimes display a gray area over the document.
- Fixed an issue where if a document is being coauthored, the draft version of a root comment may not be preserved.
- Fixed an issue where going back and forth between comment cards would sometimes display the initially selected comment with a selection highlight.
- Fixed an issue where using ‘Browse’ to save a file did not work if a comment was written but not posted and the user tried to save the file.
- With SlideTrack enabled and the comments pane closed, Ctrl+Alt+M may not open the comments pane.
- Fixed an issue when adding @mention in a table could generate the error message: ‘A table in this document has become corrupted’.
PowerPoint
Resolved Issues
- Fixed an issue where after closing a file, PowerPoint does not immediately remove it from the Presentations collection if there are any event handlers running. Hence the number of open presentations reported by the object model is incorrect, and shutdown of PowerPoint is prevented.
- Fixed an issue with highlighter : White texts with dark highlighter colors are printed as black in Grayscale.
Excel
Resolved Issue
- Fixed an issue where Excel would crash when using Text To Columns with dynamic arrays.
Outlook
Resolved Issue
- Fixed an issue where scrolling in calendar with month view, fails to show previous calendar events.
- Addresses an issue that caused users to experience a crash when viewing more than 30 calendars in a Citrix environment.
