Microsoft has announced the Office 2016 Mac Preview (http://tinyurl.com/jw59utq). Naturally, it includes new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook.
Office 2016 for Mac is powered by the cloud, so you can access your documents on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint at anytime, anywhere and on any device. Microsoft wants you to give the apps a try and provide feedback.
“Office 2016 for Mac shares an unmistakably Office experience–but it is also thoughtfully designed to take advantage of the unique features of the Mac,” says Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office 365 Client Apps and Services team. “The new apps offer full retina display support with thousands of retina-optimized graphics, full screen view for native immersive experiences, and even little Mac affordances like scroll bounce. While there are too many new features to cover in a single blog post, here’s a quick overview of a few of the highlights.”
The design tab in Word 2016 allows you to manage layout, colors and fonts across a document, and the navigation pane helps you refine the document structure and efficiently navigate to points of interest. Threaded comments turn editing cycles into conversations, so you spend less time trying to connect the dots, says Koenigsbauer.
Among the new features in Excel are a new Analysis ToolPak that offers a wide range of statistical functions, including moving averages and exponential smoothing. New PivotTable Slicers help you cut through large volumes of data to find patterns that answer questions.
PowerPoint’s new Presenter View displays the current slide, the next slide, notes and a timer on your Mac, while projecting only the presentation to your audience on the big screen. A new animation pane helps you build your presentation faster, and new slide transitions ensures the finished product is polished and professional, says Koenigsbauer.
The revved Outlook for Mac uses push mail support to deliver an always-up-to-date inbox. The improved conversation view automatically organizes your inbox around threaded conversations. The new message preview gives you the first sentence of an email just below the subject line so you can decide if you want to read it now or come back later.
OneNote lets you capture, organize and share your ideas with digital notebooks that you can access on any device. You can use tags like “To Do” or “Important” or “Question” to add structure to your notes, and find things with a search engine that tracks your tags, indexes your typed notes and uses OCR to recognize text in images and handwritten notes.
“There’s a lot packed into this preview release, and we’re excited to share it with the world,” says Koenigsbauer. “It’s not only full of new and improved features, it’s another proof point of our commitment to cross-platform support and a consistent experiences across devices. Unmistakably Office, but thoughtfully designed for the Mac.”
Those interested in becoming a Microsoft Office for Mac and iOS Accredited Support Professional, 2015 should attend one of the many regional course and exam events in the country. A Microsoft trainer will take you through what you need to know to advise and support Microsoft Office for Mac and iOS. See
