I have spent a few minutes working with the new Microsoft Editor and I am really liking it!   

Microsoft Editor is an AI-powered service that enables you to write with advanced grammar & style refinements including clarity, conciseness, formal language, vocabulary suggestions, and much more.  

Microsoft Editor is available for Word for the web and desktop, email (Outlook.com and Outlook for the web), and across the web via an Edge browser extension.   

While Editor will be available to help everyone with the basics for free, for Microsoft 365 users there are some additional powerful features that vary by endpoint. 

For those of you familiar with Grammarly it’s similar but built into Office and feels next level. It updates in real time while you work, providing immediate feedback. Traditional spelling and grammar are supported in addition to refinements such as acronyms, clarity, conciseness, formality, inclusiveness, and more. There are also stats for readability, time to read, and time to speak. Cool! 

Settings

Spelling, grammar settings are supported and abundant. There are additional settings for clarity like passive voice, conciseness like nominalizations and wordiness, formality such as contradictions and slang, inclusiveness, punctuation conventions, resume, and vocabulary. Yes, you can set your preference for Oxford commas.  

Rewrite Suggestions

I also tried the newly updated Rewrite Suggestions in Microsoft Word –  Updated Rewrite Suggestions in Microsoft Word – sentence-level writing suggestions 

When you know what you want to say but can’t seem to find the “right” way to say it, Rewrite Suggestions in Word can offer ideas to help you rephrase sentences for more impact or clarity while staying true to your original meaning.

Here is what it found:

Rewrite Suggestions found only a few sentence suggestions. I am pretty geeked out about these new features! 

Microsoft Editor supports over 20 languages according to their documentation – Editor’s spelling, grammar, and refinement availability by language 

Finally, since I am geeking out on this I decided to test the text from this blog post and here are the results:

Started with an 88% and worked up to a 93%. Not bad, readability could use a little work though.

Final thoughts

This is really cool. I have worked with Grammarly in the past and remember thinking it would be nice to have its features in Office. Now I can and I do not need to leave Office. It feels seamless and natural as I’m working. I also like the gamification of the score and stats. I hate drafts and rewrites, and this makes me want to rewrite my work to improve my score. I’m excited to use Microsoft Editor and look forward to seeing what else the mad scientist in Redmond come up with next.