Summary

• Teams will soon support custom emoji and reactions for more personalized communications.
• Channel Cards will provide a summary of what's happening in Teams channels next month.
• Copilot in Excel will offer better answers and enhanced editing capabilities for users by the end of this month.

Microsoft made a plethora of announcements related to Windows on Arm this week, including the launch of the new Snapdragon X Elite-powered Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11. But despite being busy with lots of product announcements, the software giant did manage to add tons of Microsoft 365 features to its roadmap. And we're at it again, bringing you all the latest additions to Microsoft's roadmap website and explaining what they mean for you.

4 Microsoft Teams: custom emoji and reactions, updated People app, and more

Custom emoji and reactions

Being able to add custom emojis and reactions in Teams is one of the highly-requested features on Microsoft's Community website. And if you're one of those people, Microsoft won't have you waiting for long. It is currently working on the ability to let users upload their own custom emojis and reactions for personalized communications (Feature ID: 80659). The rollout is expected to be completed for all Teams clients by the end of next month.

Cards will give an overview of what's happening within a Teams Channel

Microsoft also has major Teams features planned for next month, and support for Channel Cards is one of them. When available next month, Teams will give you a summary of what's happening within a channel through Channel Cards (Feature ID: 397883). However, this will be available only for Teams desktop and Mac clients.

Updated People app and Private line on Teams phone

An updated People app (Feature ID:396773) and support for Private line (Feature ID: 396769) for Teams Phone devices are two other important changes coming to Teams next month. The purpose of the updated People app is to help users manage contacts easily. Support for Private line, on the other hand, will give you the option to enable a second private phone number, thus allowing you to receive inbound calls directly. However, these will be available only on Android.

3 Copilot for Microsoft 365: better answers and more efficient editing

Copilot will give you better answers to your Excel-related questions

By the end of this month, Copilot will provide Excel users with "more conversational answers to a broader range of Excel-related questions and prompts" (Feature ID: 394275). The AI assistant will help you complete a task faster by suggesting the right formula. Also, Copilot in Excel will explain what went wrong, including spotting formula errors and giving you additional guidance.

Excel Copilot works on any selection

Copilot will also get smarter at helping you edit your worksheet this month (Feature ID: 396560). It'll enable the edit box everywhere on the worksheet. So, you don't need to manually select specific cells to make changes, because editing anywhere on the worksheet is more convenient. Additionally, upon selecting an area on the worksheet, Copilot in Excel will automatically identify the nearest table or data and suggest actions. All of this will be available to Excel desktop, web, and iOS clients.

2 Microsoft Outlook: more secure email communication and changes to scheduling

Support for S/MIME in new Outlook for Windows

Microsoft is adding new features to the new Outlook for Windows at a rapid pace to make it on par with the classic Outlook. One of the notable features the company is readying for the new Outlook for Windows is S/MIME (Secure/ Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) signing and encryption to bolster the security of email communications (Feature ID: 397891). This is already available in Outlook for the web and will be expanded to the new Outlook in September this year.

Scheduling assistant and time suggestion update

In addition to adding enhanced security, Microsoft is planning to introduce significant changes to the email scheduling experience. Starting this July, the new Outlook will no longer automatically show suggested times when setting up meetings. Instead, users will need to enable a "Find a time" switch for the app to suggest a suitable time that works for everyone (Feature ID: 396574). This will also be rolled out to Outlook on the web in the same month.

Moreover, the list of functionalities coming to the new Outlook for Windows next month includes a new email scheduling assistant view, consisting of improved grid lines, availability view, and more (Feature ID: 397769). One of the interesting additions coming to the scheduling assistant View is the Combined Availability Bar, which will likely be the single place where meeting organizers will see the availability of all the participants.

1 Microsoft Word: automatic document summarization

This week's Microsoft 365 weekly digest also has something for Word users. You can ask Copilot in Word to give you all the key points from a lengthy document, saving you valuable time and effort to grasp everything important written in it. Come August this year, you don't have to even ask Copilot to summarize your document, as it'll automatically detect lengthy Word documents and then summarize them for you on your Mac (Feature ID: 394277).

Microsoft may not release these features as scheduled

Although Microsoft doesn't explicitly say it, release timelines for the aforementioned capabilities are subject to change. That effectively means all the latest additions to the roadmap website might not be released in the month it's originally expected to arrive. Nevertheless, history tells us most of what Microsoft announces through its roadmap site is released on time.