Discover the future of Office documents with Microsoft Loop!

Microsoft’s Notion competitor has futuristic Lego-like Office documents and its AI-powered Copilot assistant.

Microsoft is now letting everyone preview Microsoft Loop, a collaboration hub that offers a new way to work in Office apps and manage tasks and projects. Like Notion, Microsoft Loop includes workspaces and pages where you can import and organize tasks, projects and documents. But what sets the two apart are Loop’s shareable components that allow you to turn any page into a real-time block of content that can be pasted into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word on the Web and Whiteboard.

Loop components are constantly updated and can be edited for those with whom they are shared. Imagine a table you are working on with colleagues; you can place that as a Loop component in a Teams message or Outlook email, and all edits to the table will be displayed wherever it is embedded or shared.

Microsoft Loop is designed with collaboration and co-creation in mind. The main interface looks a lot like Notion, a workspace app used by Adobe, Figma, Amazon and many other companies. Loop pages are like blank canvases where people can share and collaborate, with initial templates designed to get you started.

Loop even searches for all relevant Office documents you’ve been working on when you create a workspace, making it easy to add the documents you need to organize a project. You can use the “/” command to add labels, images, emoji, tables and more within where you type in Loop pages. The ‘@’ shortcut allows you to link suggested files or tag colleagues or friends.

Like a collaborative Word document or Google Docs, the Loop preview supports up to 50 people editing a workspace simultaneously. Microsoft has tested this with hundreds to make sure Loop can scale to that kind of demand, but mostly this is designed for teams of two to 12 people working closely together on a project, so the interface doesn’t feel too overwhelming with many people editing at the same time.

Microsoft Loop is designed with collaboration and co-creation in mind. The main interface looks a lot like Notion, a workspace app used by Adobe, Figma, Amazon and many other companies. Loop pages are like blank canvases where people can share and collaborate, with initial templates designed to get you started.

Loop even searches for all relevant Office documents you’ve been working on when you create a workspace, making it easy to add the documents you need to organize a project. You can use the “/” command to add labels, images, emoji, tables and more within where you type in Loop pages. The ‘@’ shortcut allows you to link suggested files or tag colleagues or friends.

Like a collaborative Word document or Google Docs, the Loop preview supports up to 50 people editing a workspace simultaneously. Microsoft has tested this with hundreds to make sure Loop can scale to that kind of demand, but mostly this is designed for teams of two to 12 people working closely together on a project, so the interface doesn’t feel too overwhelming with many people editing at the same time.

Microsoft also brings Loop to mobile. While your phone is not always the best way to create documents, it is often handy for checking in on the go or jotting down an important note you came up with outside your PC. The Loop mobile app is designed for capturing photos, ideas and more. “This was not about trying to just replicate the desktop experience, but really thinking about how we make it easy for you to consume and perform especially light operations on mobile,” explained Ron Pessner, a director of program management working on Loop at Microsoft.

Loop is the end result of years of work by Microsoft to create a new kind of Office document. Formerly known as Fluid, Microsoft’s core idea is to turn the tables, charts and lists you typically find in Office documents into living, collaborative content blocks that exist everywhere.

Microsoft is also privately testing its new Microsoft 365 Copilot system in Loop. You can use AI-powered suggestions to create a brainstorm or blueprint, with Microsoft adapting its Copilot to support a multiplayer mode in which you and your colleagues can all ask the AI chatbot questions and manipulate the answers. The nice thing is that the answers are a live canvas, so you can go and edit them freely and then share them in Outlook and Teams.

Notion has a similar AI-powered system that goes much further. You can use it to analyze meeting notes, create summaries, display important information and rewrite or generate text. Notion also has a neat web clipper feature that lets you import any page on the Internet.

Microsoft is now opening up Loop for public preview, giving businesses and even consumers access to an early version of the software. If you have a Microsoft account or Azure Active Directory account, you can access via the web app, and iOS and Android versions will soon be available for businesses and consumers.

Source: theverge