Slack is introducing some major improvements for Office users today. The company is introducing a couple of upgrades to some of the Office integration that significantly improves the experience and makes it easier for users to deal with their Office documents and events right from Slack.

Firstly, Slack is getting improved support for Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar. With the new Slack add-on for Outlook, you will be able to forward emails from Outlook right into your Slack channels. Outlook Calendar will also now let you confirm event/meeting invites and jump into calls right from Skype. Slack will also sync your status with your status from Outlook, so when you are in a meeting, you won’t have to manually change your Slack status to let your teammates know, for example.

And secondly, Slack is getting better support for Office files. You will now be able to add documents from OneDrive easily with the new OneDrive app on Slack, and you can also search for files and preview them from OneDrive right on Slack. Talking about previews, Slack now lets you get full previews of Office files like Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations right from Slack itself without needing to download the files.

Slack’s improved integration for Office apps is actually quite impressive. The thing that is a bit confusing, however, is the fact that if your company is using Office 365, you are most likely using Microsoft Teams instead of Slack, and so there isn’t a lot of use for the new integrations here. But still, I’d imagine there are a lot of companies and users that rely on both Slack and Office 365 instead of using Microsoft Teams, so this will be very useful for those users.

Tagged with Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Slack