As Microsoft Build 2020 kicks off today, the tech company announced that it is expanding its Fluid Office technology and will be coming to Officecom in the coming months

Think of FluidOffice as a super-powerful building block that can be incorporated into a variety of documents, and in a blog post announcing Fluid's arrival in Outlook and Officecom, Dan Zarzer, Microsoft's head of product wrote that Fluid is "designed to make collaboration adaptive, flexible, and focused by removing barriers between apps"

It is best to think of Fluid elements not as a type of document, but as building blocks that can take any shape or form Zarzar writes that "Fluid components come in many forms, including tables, charts, and task lists"

"Easily insert a variety of components into your email or chat"

In an online preview video, Microsoft showed how the pie chart works simultaneously in Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook The chart becomes a living document that can be updated by anyone with the proper authorization

When you interact with the fluid elements, you see avatars of your other colleagues, just as you do with Google Docs In this way, your project becomes a living, breathing entity and you can keep your team members updated throughout the process And unlike Google Docs, there is no need to update multiple documents to ensure that all charts are consistent across pages

John Friedman, Microsoft's corporate vice president of design and research, told The Verge that Microsoft is thinking about Fluid on a large scale, "Five, 10, 15, 100 people can be doing things simultaneously, It's truly real-time"

Developers can learn more at the Microsoft Fluid preview site, but regular users like me with a Microsoftcom account cannot enter