New Microsoft Office Preview Build Released with Plenty of Fixes

A new build is now available for Windows testers

Microsoft keeps working on improving the Office productivity suite, and despite the holiday season is already upon us, this doesn’t mean the company can’t provide testers with new builds to try out.

And this week, the company has shipped a new version to the beta channel, this time bringing Office to version 13617.20002.

Needless to say, the focus this time has been on improving the overall experience with the built-in apps rather than on new features, and according to the official changelog, which you can check out in full in the box after the jump, Word, Excel, and Outlook have been the focus this time.

For example, Word has received an improvement in the way to provide access to certain documents.

“We fixed an issue that caused users to be unable to specify how long they wanted to allow access for when starting a mail merge from Word, resulting in them getting excess prompts,” Microsoft explains.

Only in preview program for now

On the other hand, Excel has received two important bugs that improve the way users work with the app and prevent unexpected crashes (which to be honest are quite awful, especially when working with large documents).

“We fixed an issue where Excel would close unexpectedly when opening UNC files that have invalid file attributes (creation time, modified time, etc.). We fixed an issue where decimal and thousands separators settings carryover when copying a chart from Excel and pasting into Word,” Microsoft says.

Keep in mind this new release is still in the preview stage, so the fixes we detailed here would only go live for the production channel when the testing is complete. In other words, Microsoft first wants to make sure everything is working correctly and only then bring the same improvements to devices that aren’t part of its Office Insider program to receive early builds.