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Announcing Microsoft Loop
Microsoft Loop allows you to create "workspaces" for project and share "components" across all online Microsoft applications. Might it be also intended as a replacemet for the ageing SharePoint?

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 March 2023

In this blog

The Loop home page
Components
The Love-Child of SharePoint and OLE Objects?
Final Thoughts

Announcing Microsoft Loop

Microsoft Loop allows you to "think, plan and create together like never before" according to the Loop website, but ... don't Teams, Project, SharePoint and other programs already let you do this?

You can activate the trial version of Loop, but it's not straightforward (your Office 365 administrator probably won't thank you for asking).

The Loop home page

Here's a typical Loop workspace for a project:

Someone using a "workspace" in Loop, divided into "pages".

So far, so blah: a workspace is just a responsive area where people can add comments and upload files and see their changes (and those by made other people) in real time.

Components

The big innovation in Loop is the idea of a component:

Creating a component in Loop.

A component can be a list:

You could then include this list within virtually any Microsoft online application.

It can be a table:

Again, you could then add this component into an email, workbook, document or presentation.

Or it could be something as simple as a paragraph, which you could again share across multiple applications.

The Love-Child of SharePoint and OLE Objects?

Older readers will remember OLE objects (they still exist, but I don't think they're called this any more):

An example of creating an OLE object: embedding a chart from Excel within PowerPoint.

When you double-click on an embedded object, it takes you to the source application:

Double-clicking here would take you to the source Excel workbook.

What has this got to do with Loop? Well, it seems to this blogger that a component is like a SharePoint list or table, but also like an OLE object in that it can be shared across all Microsoft applications.

Any changes made to the component in any of its views will (obviously) immediately update in all the others.

Final Thoughts

The launch of Loop seems like a hostage to fortune to me: from now on every online Microsoft application is going to have to support the insertion of Loop components. It's easy enough to do this in Word, but what would a Loop list look like in an Excel workbook? Or a Loop table in a PowerPoint presentation?

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