Microsoft Office 365 Gets New Toolbar, Search Redesigns

Microsoft’s subscription-based Office 365 service will get a handful of small, but significant, changes over the course of this summer. The Redmond, Washington-based global tech giant unveiled on Wednesday a set of interface changes that will gradually roll out to Office 365 customers in certain apps over the next couple of months.

Corporate VP for Office and Windows Marketing Jared Spataro outlined the updates in a blog post on Microsoft’s website. Those who use apps like Microsoft Word on Office.com and Office 365 will see some of these changes roll out in the near future, but nothing is being significantly overhauled.

Some of the changes can be seen in the video below.

The biggest change is that the toolbar at the top of Word — Microsoft calls it the “ribbon” — is being condensed from three lines of screen space to one. That means users will see more of whatever they are working on in Word and fewer cluttered commands on the toolbar.

That update rolled out to some users Wednesday, exclusively for the browser version of Word. The Windows apps (that are not browser-based) for Word, PowerPoint and Excel will remain as they are until Microsoft figures out how to properly implement this feature without angering people who still use those versions.

The other major change coming to the browser version of Office is an expanded search feature. Users who place their mouse cursor over the search bar will get automatic suggestions for queries based on whatever they are working on at the time, generated by Microsoft’s AI.

Aside from that, Microsoft redesigned the apps with new icons and colors so they will look better on monitors of varying sizes. Unlike the other changes, these will eventually apply to non-browser versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Office 365 is the modern version of Microsoft’s suite of Office apps. For $70 per year, users get access to the apps complete with regular updates and a terabyte of cloud storage, but there are other more expensive plans for businesses and such. Roughly 31 million people have individual subscriptions to Office 365, according to CNN Money.