Microsoft To Support New Office File Formats

Microsoft has released a new Office Insider Preview for Windows users. For the first time, the build includes support for new ODF 1.3 file formats such as .odt, .ods, and .odp. But there are also other innovations.

The new Office build has the number 14420.20004 and this time contains bug fixes for Word, Excel, Publisher, and Office Suite and a few interesting new features. In the preview, Microsoft added support for the latest version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 for the first time. This means that you can now try out support for .odt, .ods, and .odp, for example. The ODF 1.3 specification adds support for other filename extensions already supported by the Office Open XML (OOXML) format. To use the new formats, simply select the OpenDocument format in the save dialog for the save type.

“Old” view is back

Another new feature is the ability to display multiple months both horizontally and vertically in Outlook in the calendar to-do bar.

In previous versions of Outlook, users could customize their view to show more than a month at a time in the calendar to-do bar. This feature is now returning. To display the to-do bar in the calendar module, select View> To-Do Bar> Calendar and change the size of the window to display several months.

Most of the other changes are optimizations, but there are also some bug fixes. Among other things, we fixed an issue where creating a meeting in Outlook would display an unexpected notice about the default shortening of meetings if the option was not configured by the Exchange administrator. For Word, Excel, and Publisher there is also a bug fix for stability problems in connection with graphics. The new Insider Preview is available in the beta channel. Anyone who has not yet registered for the program can do so at Microsoft at any time.