On Thursday Microsoft released the. It's downloadable for free, with a final release expected 'later this summer' and available for use via an Office 365 subscription. I spent this morning trying out the new editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here's an initial hands-on report. Unified look Office 2011 for Mac was a mess of a release in terms of interface. At the top of the document window was a toolbar, followed by a collapsible tab bar with multiple levels of buttons, all in various shades of gray. Office 2016 is a vast improvement. There's a unified tab/ribbon bar that's reminiscent of the version found on Windows and iOS; the design picks up the mostly monochromatic stylings of OS X Yosemite. Toolbar buttons have been freed of heavy borders and gradients. ![]() The Ribbon in Word 2016 is smaller than in Word 2013 and is solid blue rather than white. (Click image to enlarge it.) To find out which commands live on which tabs on the Ribbon, download our. If you are using Microsoft Word, select at a minimum, the following options: - Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations - Document Properties and Personal Information - Invisible Content (You will need to scroll down to see this.) - Hidden Text (You will need to scroll down to see this.) Click Inspect. The toolbar at the very top of the window is now smaller and shares space, Yosemite-style, with the open/close/minimize buttons. As with Office for Windows, the per-app color highlights (which are visible in the tab bar on iOS) are displayed at the bottom of each window in the status bar. That's a nice concession to the Mac's interface metaphor while also managing to keep a connection to the identity of each of these apps. As a long time Mac user, though, it still feels fundamentally wrong that every window in Office is topped with a collection of text items, just below the open/close/minimize widgets. Almost no Mac app window looks like that--and almost every Windows window does. It's consistent with the rest of Office across platforms, and it's attractive, but when I'm using it I keep feeling like I'm using Windows. But this is Microsoft's flagship productivity suite--maybe that's not surprising. Word Word for Mac now allows multiple users to edit a document at once, and supports threaded comments. As someone who used to spend endless hours battering manuscripts into shape in Word, it's nice to see support for chained comments rather our old tried-and-true methods of adding comments on each additional word, or trying to add your comment to an existing comment. How to curve lettering in word for mac. I'm a little disappointed by the way Word (and really, all of Office) handles multiple editors. When a user saves a document, they're informed that there have been changes elsewhere in the document. This is great if you've got different people working on different parts of a document, but if you want truly synchronous collaboration, Google's web apps are a better choice. It's not fair to judge beta software on performance, and so I'm going to enter a no-judge zone here to say that typing text into Word on this beta felt kind of jerky and hesitant. And it too can't manage membership. So I borrowed a friend's PC, started IE 8, the only browser that seems to be supported. Got to the point of adding email addresses as members of the list I made. That's obviously a no-go for a word processor, especially one running on a Mac with a 4GHz Core i7 processor, so I'll just whistle past the graveyard and assume it'll all be ironed out before final release. Excel Fans of Windows keyboard shortcuts rejoice--Excel (but strangely not Word?!) has mapped all of the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts onto the Mac version. Mac users trained in the ways of the Command key will still feel at home, but if you habitually use the Control key, you'll find that all of the standard Excel for Windows keyboard shortcuts will work on the Mac. ![]() In another first for Mac users, the selection cursor in Excel is now animated. It's been like this on Windows for a while, but this is the first time Mac users of Excel have been able to click on a cell and watch as the selection cursor flies over to the cell via an animation. It's a little weird, if I'm being honest. That's an unnecessary animation flourish that feels more Apple than Microsoft. And yet Apple's Numbers spreadsheet doesn't do it, and Excel does. PowerPoint The app that has benefited the most from the Office 2016 for Mac redesign is probably PowerPoint. PowerPoint 2011 (the lower of the two windows in the image below) always felt heavy and cluttered and I really hated working in it.
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