Last week, Microsoft made a preview edition of Office 2016 for Mac available to the masses, runnable on any OS X Yosemite computer. If you’ve been struggling with Office for Mac 2011 and suffering from Windows envy, your time has finally come. Reading and receiving messages with this weird account that looks like spamFor many years, Office for Mac has played second fiddle to its Windows cousin.(Outlook 2016 has been updated precious little in the past year and not at all since January it’s still an embarrassment.) If you already have Office 2011 installed, the new Office 2016 will run side by side on the same Mac with no interference. Included in the office suite is Outlook 2011, a step up from the monstrosity known as Entourage, which was a watered down attempt at bringing Outlook to the Mac since OS9.This preview edition includes new beta versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as the previously released beta versions of OneNote and Outlook 2016 for Mac. Naturally, we’ll have to wait for the final, shipping products to draw detailed conclusions.Microsoft released it's latest office suite in September of 2010, which in my opinion is a huge leap forward in terms of usability and responsiveness from earlier versions available for the Mac.In this beta incarnation, Word 2016 alone is bigger than the entire Office for Mac 2011 suite. The differences are tiny, but they account for the differences in the way the Mac places pixels on the screen.Note that the preview ain’t tiny. You cant - its not supported in Outlook 2011 for Mac.The fonts distributed with Mac Office have been ver y carefully adjusted ('hinted') so documents on the Mac will look and orint the same way as documents using the PC versions of those fonts on the PC. When you are composing an email, theres a Signatures.Office 2016 for Mac unabashedly embraces the traditional keyboard-and-mouse/trackpad paradigm and doesn’t make any awkward trade-offs for touch-driven operation, as we saw in Office 2013 for Windows.Remarkably, if you currently use Office 2011, most of the interface will feel comfortable. Office 2016 for Mac takes full advantage of the Retina screen.If you’re coming from Office for iPad, Android, or Windows 10, the Mac interface is completely different. I’ve never seen Office look so good on any platform (see Figure 1). If you have a Retina screen, wow - the interface adjusts itself automatically, and the high resolution comes shining through everywhere, thanks to Microsoft switching over (almost) completely to Apple’s Cocoa APIs. As Microsoft reiterated in November: “Office 365 commercial and consumer subscribers will get the next version at no additional cost.” Across-the-board changesIf you’re an Office for Mac 2011 user, you’ll be struck immediately by the updated interface. Everyones email settings are different and it will require that you manually create your own signature.As to be expected, we have no idea how much Microsoft will charge for the stand-alone version by the time it ships later this year.
![]() Outlook 2011 Signature Looks Different Mac Available ToMicrosoft makes it easy to use OneDrive and hard to use anything else.You can add online services to the Save As dialog (click the Add a Service link), but at this point only OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint are available. To save a new file to your local computer, click the On My Mac button.Figure 2. When you save a new document, as shown in Figure 2, Office defaults to your OneDrive Documents folder. The ribbons have been reorganized and the icons redesigned, but almost all of the old Office 2011/2013 options have immediately recognizable analogs in the new version.There’s no “backstage” in Office 2016 for Mac, as there is in Office 2013 for Windows, so simple file management tasks - renaming, Save As, delete, copy, move - aren’t supported inside Office itself.Office 2016 for Mac bakes OneDrive into the product. My passport format for mac read it on pcYou then click Open My Mac, and only then do you get the standard OS X Open dialog.Working with local files, iCloud Drive files, and files in cloud storage other than Microsoft's own services is thus both awkward and time-consuming. Even if use use the Mac's standard File > Open menu command or Command-O shortcut you're brought to the decidedly non-Mac file manager in Office. I haven’t heard any official discussion of adding iCloud as an anointed Service link, although you can laboriously save a file to iCloud by clicking On My Mac, then choosing iCloud Drive.To open files, you have to use the On My Mac button in the current Office app. ![]() Much of the text in the text boxes gets dropped entirely. It consists of many text boxes with wrapped photos. This newsletter renders properly in Word 2013 for Windows, but gets jumbled in Word 2016 for Mac.The misbehaving file isn’t a specially constructed format-buster. As you can see in Figure 4, a DOCX file that opens and displays properly in Word 2013 for Windows gets hopelessly scrambled when opened in Word 2016 for Mac.Figure 4. The same observation applies to the new Picture Format ribbon, which is almost identical to the Picture Format ribbon in Word 2013 for Windows.The new multifunctional Navigation Pane adds one navigation type to the three already found in Word 2013 for Windows - headings, page thumbnails, search results - so you can now navigate by type of change (insertions, deletions, moves, formatting, comments).At this point, there are no Quick Parts available for document assembly.I encountered one file-rendering problem. It’s functionally equivalent to the Styles pane in Word 2013 for Windows, though the appearance is quite different.Microsoft says there’s a new threaded comment capability, which as best as I could tell is identical to threaded comments (comments made to comments) in Word 2013 for Windows. ![]() There's no indication yet whether that’s a known problem, a change coming in Word 2016 for Windows, or simply beta blues.
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