From the Office blog: Office 2016 Public Preview Now Available
Intuitive data connecting and shaping capabilities. With integrated Power Query, use Excel as your personal analysis workspace by connecting to and viewing all the data around you. Take advantage of a broad range of data sources, including tables from websites, corporate data like SAP Business Objects, unstructured sources like Hadoop, and services like Salesforce. After bringing all your data together in one place, quickly shape and combine to fit your unique business needs and get to analysis in seconds
Go here for instructions on how to get the preview.
I use Oracle Virtualbox to install previews. So far, the 2016 preview has been remarkably stable, but I’m not one for taking chances.
“Tell Me, a new search tool available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, serves up the commands you need by simply typing what you want to do. ”
Accompanied by a chatty paper-clip perhaps? I hope there is also an option to get helpful local help in VBA like we had up to 2010.
The clutter feature sounds good though.
The big question: Are PowerQuery and PowerPivot only available in the professional version, or in all versions of Excel? I suspect the former.
Wow! Three posts at DDOE in a Day. Maybe Charles will add a new post today too!
“We’re not making any changes to Macros or Add-ins in this release. It’s rare that “no changes” is a something we’d want to highlight, but we think it’s worth celebrating the consistency in the programming model across releases. We understand how important this is and we’re committed to a high level of compatibility as we continue to innovate. (See dev.office.com for more on how we’re innovating in Office extensibility.)”