“Based on feedback from the great Mac Office community, we’ve made major updates to each of the apps and we couldn’t be more pleased to deliver it first to our Office 365 customers”, explains Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Office apps and services.
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According to Koenigsbauer, the Office 2016 for Mac preview was the biggest-ever Office for Mac beta, and outstripped Microsoft’s expectations. That program led to the company receiving over 100,000 pieces of feedback, it says, and over the course of the test period, Microsoft has updated the software seven times to improve its performance and stability.
Excel for Mac-The new Excel for Mac helps you visualize your information by recommending charts best suited for your data with chart previews. For example, the redesigned Ribbon brings the Mac versions in line with the appearance of the iPad and Windows versions, and there’s a new task pane to help simplify complex tasks, like formatting images within Word, designing animations within PowerPoint and inserting formulas in Excel.
The software includes a new Yosemite-style design that takes advantage of features like full-screen support, Retina displays, and multi-touch gestures, while cloud integration makes all Microsoft files available across a range of devices. Given the Mac’s popularity in education, it’s not surprising that Office for Mac includes a number of features that will be useful for students, including document collaboration and Smart Lookup in Word, audio recording in OneNote, side-by-side calendar views in Outlook, and more.
All three apps in Office have new open and create windows that show documents saved to OneDrive across all platforms. Excel also has its fair share of enhancements, including new keyboard shortcuts, new functions, and a new PivotTable Slicer that allows you to set parameters for data to quickly find new data points from existing numbers.
PowerPoint, meanwhile, has received improvements to Presenter View as well as a new animation pane.
Updated regularly going forward. A standalone version will not become available until September, notes Microsoft, and pricing for that option is not yet available. The firm plans to release updates and new features for Office 365 customers at least once per quarter.
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DON’T MISS: How have you used Netflix this long without knowing these 10 tips and tricks? And Office 2016 for Windows-the full desktop-based applications-will ship “this fall”.
