What's new in Office 365 features?

Microsoft is tops in Office applications with its Office 365 suite because of continuous development. Some of the features described here are available only if you have a subscription to Office 365 and Office Insiders.

In the latest version of Office 365 (November 2016)  these are the new features:

Learning tools for improved reading:

Use Read Mode with new commands and improve your reading skills. You can adjust text spacing, observe syllable breaks and highlight each word as document is read aloud.

Built-in accessibility
Improved support for asistive technology with Narrator. You can also create accessible documents as well.

Insert and edit icons:

Your document should have visible impact and to this end use icons available, some 500 of them. You can insert and edit icons

SVG images can now be used in Word:

You can now insert and edit SVG graphics without using any export software. Office 365 Word supports SVG graphics embedding.

How do you use Microsoft Mouse Gestures?

Mouse Gestures are something more you can do with your mouse than just clicking here and there. It makes you more productive.

Mouse gesture extension is a Microsoft extension that allows you perform browsing tasks using mouse gesture. You need to right click the mouse before gesturing. If you are in the InPrivate browsing mode you cannot use extensions.

You get Mouse Gesture extension app from Microsoft Store. It is available for PC from Microsoft store.



Install it and you get to see this:



Ways to work with mouse gestures:

Right click mouse, hold down and move to right edge to close the tab.

Right click mouse, hold down and move to left edge to go to previous tab.

Right click mouse, hold down move down and move left to close all tabs except the present.

Right click mouse, hold down, move left and move up to close all tabs.

Read about all gestures here:

ms-browser-extension://MouseGestures_MicrosoftMouseGestures_8wekyb3d8bbwe/html/ftu.html#welcome

All gestures here:

Is there a spatial data visualizer on SQL Anywhere 17?

The short answer is yes.

Following globalization and opening of data centers all over the world, visualizing spatial data has become urgent and is supported by applications as well as databases.

SQL Anywhere 17 does have a spatial data viewer and you will have to invoke it in the Interactive. The procedure is as follows:

There is table called SpatialShapes in the 'demo' database which has several geometric shapes in each row of it's SpatialShapes table.

After connecting to the 'demo' database right click the SpatialShapes(GROUPO) table to reveal a drop-down list as shown.

SpatialGeom_00

In the above drop-down pick the first option, View data in Interactive SQL. The Interactive SQL windows appears as shown with a Select query.

SpatialGeom_01

Click Tools to display the drop-down list.

SpatialGeom_02

Click Spatial Viewer in the list to open the Spatial Viewer1 window as shown.

SpatialGeom_03

 Click Execute at the bottom of the above window to display the graphic view of the data which consists of a variety of geometrical shapes as shown.

SpatialGeom_04

What does Cortana Intelligence Suite consists of?

That is quite a big question. Probably you have conversed with Cortana, if you are a Windows Phone user but Cortana does a lot more than that. Cortana is the foundational basis of Microsoft's AI ambitions. This makes it important to get a handle of this as AI is deemed to be the most important technology in the future. Cortana is also good at searching here is an early question I posed to Cortana asking for image identification from the web.

Cortana_DT.png

You have tons of data, overwhelmingly huge, and how do you get intelligence out of this? The answer to using this intelligently is Cortana Intelligence suite.

CortanaIntelSuite_00

What does Cortana Intelligence Suite consist of?

It consists of almost all of the important developments at Microsoft in the past decades. Here is a overview diagram from Microsoft's site here.

CortanaIntelSuite_01.PNG

The key features are:

Information Management: Data Orchestration on a fully managed, end-to-end Cloud Platform.
  Azure Data Factory - Build pipelines and colect data from   services
  Azure Data Catalog - effective management of data sources
  Azure Event Hub- staging site for incoming stream data

Big Data Stores:
Azure SQL Data Warehouses for storing and managing structured data with elastic scaling and massive parallel processing capabilities
Azure Data Lake Store for massive throughput and analytics

Machine Learning and Analytics:
Azure Machine Learning-Design and publish predictive models
Azure HDInsight: Analyze data in Storm and Spark for Hadoop
Azure Data Lake and Stream Analytics: Integrating code from R or Python and analyze any kind or any size of data.
Microsoft BI for rich data visualizations

Intelligence:
Cognitive Services - enable natural and contextual interactions; Integrate models with Cortana using speech and receive proactive notifications
Bot Framework: Build Bots to interact with Users wherever they are using SMS to Skype, Office 365

Here  are some customers who have come on board to implement.

CortanaIntelSuite_02.PNG