Fluid Components Starting to Arrive in Microsoft Platforms Soon
The biggest change to Microsoft’s Office documents in decades is coming to life soon, as the company’s Fluid framework arrives in Microsoft Teams, OneNote, Outlook, and Whiteboard. The future-facing concept of Fluid’s framework, introduced last year, allows for immediate sync of content that lives independently across the web. Up until this point, Microsoft’s collaboration tools for Office documents were restricted to static documents.
See Microsoft Fluid components in action.
What Does Microsoft Fluid Components Mean For You?
Instead of tables, graphs, and lists that are bound to specific documents, Fluid components are collaborative modules that exist across different applications. This makes collaboration even easier as content can be copy, pasted, and shared with others in a simplified way. Starting this summer, you’ll start seeing these components embedded into meetings and chats in Microsoft Teams. For example, Microsoft Teams meeting will soon have a built-in notes component that allows anyone to type and see others typing in real time and will immediately sync these notes and added tasks to your Microsoft 365 and Outlook calendar.
The launch of Fluid documents coincides with employees returning to their offices and the rise of a new hybrid work experience. “We were excited about going hard and fast with Fluid, and then the pandemic hit,” says Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The Verge. “So we largely put a lot of our energy onto Teams, and we think of Teams as the scaffolding that creates the connection, but now as we move back to hybrid, we increasingly believe we need more innovation in what I call the canvas that gets collaboration done.”
The launch of Fluid represents one of the biggest changes to Microsoft Office in decades. This is just the start of Fluid making its way to Microsoft 365 and we’re bound to see more over the course of this year and beyond.
Find out more about these new Microsoft Office Fluid documents here.