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Get Yammer in Teams and new features in Microsoft Edge—here’s what’s new to Microsoft 365 in April

In this world of remote everything, our customers are discovering so many new ways to work and learn online. And we’re committed to shipping updates and improvements to our tools that help them stay connected, productive, and secure through the current crisis and beyond. This month, we’re announcing a new Yammer app in Microsoft Teams as well as a new way to intuitively search data in Excel. Meanwhile, capabilities in Microsoft Edge make it easier to copy and paste between tabs and apps, manage open tabs, organize information more intuitively, and better protect your data as you browse and work online. Let’s dig into all of April’s news.

Connect and create with app updates in Yammer, Excel, Outlook, and Visio

This month, we’re introducing app updates that bring the new Yammer experience to Teams and mobile; help you easily analyze data in Excel; and quickly make changes to diagrams in Visio for the web.

Bring Yammer into Teams—Last November at Ignite, we unveiled the new Yammer, with a beautiful new design that powers community, knowledge-sharing, and employee engagement. The new Yammer includes a fully interactive Yammer app called “Communities” that brings your communities and conversations directly into Microsoft Teams. Put simply: It’s Yammer, but in Teams. No more toggling between apps or confusion about where to chat—just pin the Yammer app in the navigation rail and start discovering communities, knowledge, and conversations alongside your projects, chats, and meetings. Install the Yammer app in Teams to get started.

A Yammer community in Microsoft Teams.

Experience the new Yammer on mobile—The new Yammer app for iOS and Android connects your entire organization with a redesigned live events experience that allows everyone to watch and participate right in the app, enhancing company-wide engagement. Plus, mobile users can experience the new Yammer layouts and styling that make it easier to discover content and post replies, like comments, and include better previews for images, videos, links, and files. Finally, we’ve improved the performance of uploading attachments and large videos. Download or update your app from the App Store or Play Store.

Quickly turn data into insights with natural language queries in Excel—Data analysis in Excel just got incredibly intuitive. At Ignite last year, we announced that we were bringing natural language queries to Excel, enabling you to ask a plain language question of your data to get answers. We’re excited to announce that the natural language queries feature is now generally available to Microsoft 365 subscribers in Excel for Windows, Mac, and Excel for the web. Simply open the Ideas pane in Excel, enter a question in the query box at the top of the pane, and press Enter.

The Ideas pane in Microsoft Excel.

Easily schedule shorter meetings—As we learn more about remote work productivity, we’re finding that teams tend to prefer shorter meetings while working apart to help break up the day. This month, we’re announcing a new Outlook feature that lets you end appointments and meetings early so you can get 5, 10, or 15 minutes back after every meeting. You’ll be able to set this up in the Calendar settings soon.

Calendar settings in Outlook, events and invitations.

Bring ideas to life in Visio for the web—We’re adding a trio of new capabilities in Visio for the web. Now you can replace an existing shape in a diagram with a more relevant one in just a few clicks. The new shape will retain the formatting, connectors, and all other characteristics of the original shape. You can also add images of diagrams to other documents to easily share with stakeholders. Finally, you can now more easily focus on certain elements in a diagram with the new pinch-and-zoom functionality.

Pinch and zoom functionality demonstrated in Visio for the web.

Copy and paste and more in Microsoft Edge

This month, we announced a host of new capabilities coming to Microsoft Edge that demonstrate our commitment to help you work more quickly, stay organized, save time, and have more control while you browse and work online. This month’s updates deliver more control over your data and your family’s online information, and offer new ways to organize your online research. If you haven’t yet tried the new Microsoft Edge, you can download it here.

Copy and paste between tabs and appsSmart copy will make it easier to select, copy, and paste the exact content you want from the web while preserving the rich web format. This allows you to save valuable time since you don’t need to re-format tables, fonts, and more. Smart copy is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Smart copy in Microsoft Edge used to select a list from Wikipedia. It is then pasted into an Outlook email.

Manage many tabs at once—For those who like to have dozens of tabs open at a time, we’ve introduced vertical tabs to make it easier to manage many open tabs at once. No more struggling to see which tab is which or accidentally closing a tab as a result. Vertical tabs is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge.

Search more securely—Each year, millions of online personal credentials are exposed in data breaches and end up being sold on the dark web. Password Monitor helps keep your online accounts safe from hackers by notifying you if the credentials you’ve saved to autofill have been detected on the dark web, and providing a way to update them. Password Monitor is coming soon to preview builds of Microsoft Edge.

Password Monitor used on a website in Microsoft Edge.

Browse privatelyInPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Search with Microsoft Bing keeps your web browsing and Bing search history private by automatically deleting history, cookies, and site data when you finish a browsing session. InPrivate searches are never saved to Bing or Microsoft browsing history, and Bing prevents you from signing into your Microsoft account, so searches are not attributed back to you. InPrivate Mode with seamless integration of InPrivate Search is now generally available. Download Microsoft Edge and try it now.

InPrivate Browsing demonstrated in Microsoft Edge.

Organize your research—When researching online, it can be difficult to organize your results, resources, and content you find across the web. Collections helps you easily collect information from different websites and organize it so you can pick up right where you left off between sessions. And with Microsoft 365 integrations, you can export your collections to Word or Excel. Send to Word allows you get a head start on research with automatically generated citations, and Send to Excel creates an automatically formatted table with key information, perfect for side-by-side comparisons. Collections is now generally available. Download Microsoft Edge and try it now.

A collection created in Microsoft Edge.

Give back more easily—Finally, you can now donate to causes just by searching in Bing. The new Give Mode feature enables you to automatically donate the Microsoft Rewards points you earn to the nonprofit of your choice. Give Mode is now generally available. Try it now and start giving back to your community.

The Give Mode feature on a Bing homepage.

Move to remote work more easily

We’re updating our small and medium-sized business offerings and adding new reporting tools to help organizations move more easily to remote work and make the most of their Microsoft 365 investments.

Ease the move to remote work with new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Business Premium—With so many employees working from home, small and medium-sized businesses need to stay productive without compromising security. We’re adding the full Azure AD Premium P1 License to Microsoft 365 Business Premium (formerly called Microsoft 365 Business). With this addition, customers will now get features like Cloud App Discovery, application proxy, dynamic groups, and more, which help employees maintain secure access to work apps from home. This change is rolling out to new customers now, and existing customers will see it added automatically in the coming months.

Image showing HR apps, Active Directory, SaaS apps, cloud-hosted apps, and on-premises and legacy apps all connected to Microsoft Azure AD.

Get insights into how your organization is working—To help our customers understand how remote work is impacting their organization’s usage behaviors, we added new data to the Microsoft 365 usage reports. The updates include helping you measure calendar activity in the email report, understanding the total activity across Microsoft 365, and a new report to help you see Microsoft 365 app (formerly Office 365 ProPlus) usage. We also added a new card to the usage report homepage to help you understand how solutions that contribute to remote work are being used. You can learn more about usage reports and see your specific data in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

A usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

At a time when we are all navigating a lot of uncertainty, we are committed to building the tools that enable our customers to work and learn remotely. From bringing Yammer right into your Teams app to finding new ways to help you search more securely and give to the causes that matter to you most, these updates are aimed at helping you stay connected, productive, and secure through the current crisis and beyond.