Office 2016 for Mac sports a far better interface than Office 2011, integrates well with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and dramatically improves Outlook.The current version of Microsoft Office 2016 for the Mac is Version 15.x. It was well worth the wait. If you choose to upgrade to Microsoft 365 or Office 2019 for Mac, you'll simply need to remove the existing Office 2016 for Mac license, but you won't need to remove. Office 2016 for Mac license.It's a clever way to bridge the worlds of Office and Mac OS X.Not everyone is a Ribbon fan, though, and those who wish it were gone, or just want to give themselves a little more screen real estate, can hide it by clicking a small up arrow at the Ribbon's far right. The usual Mac menu that sits atop Mac applications is hidden as well, although you can reveal it by moving your cursor to the top of the screen. That's largely in part because the Ribbon has been redone, and now looks and works as it does in the Windows version of Office.The Ribbon is far more prominent and now sits close to the top of the screen rather than (as before) beneath a long row of icons for doing things such as opening and closing files, printing and so on. It's less cluttered, cleaner and sleeker-looking, more logically organized, more colorful and simpler to use. It will sell as a standalone Mac product later this month.)The moment you run any Office application, you know you've left the aging Office 2011 behind. It’s currently only available as part of a subscription to Office 365, which allows you to install Office on multiple devices.Also, I use the Windows version of Office, and because the Mac version now closely mirrors it, I found switching between Office on Windows and Office on the Mac to be largely seamless.In Office 2016, Microsoft is bringing a common look and feel to the suite across all platforms, which is why this Mac version looks much like the recently released Windows-based Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview. You'll find similar reorganizations throughout all of Office.For me, this reorganized Ribbon has made Office more usable and far more pleasurable to use than the previous version. In Office 2011 you had to go on a treasure hunt through many different tabs to find all that. So now, you use the Insert tab when you want to insert anything, whether it be art, a table, header, link and so on. For example, Word's confusing Document Elements tab is gone most of what was there can now be found in the more logically-named Insert tab. Click the arrow to make the Ribbon come back.Not only has the Ribbon been moved but it's been reorganized, which is all to the good.
Microsoft Office Home And Business 2016 Mac Sports ABut that still won't offer other Backstage capabilities, such as controlling what changes people can make to a document. That's missing in the Mac version.You can do some of what Backstage offers in the Mac version - for example, you can open files by either clicking on a folder icon just above the Ribbon on the left-hand side of the screen or by pressing the Command-O keyboard combination. In the Windows version of Office, when you click the File tab, you're sent to what Microsoft calls Backstage, for doing things such as opening a file, viewing cloud-based services associated with your accounts and so on. I found that exceptionally useful, and hope that Microsoft eventually introduces it in the final, shipping version of Office 2016 for the Mac.Another difference: The Ribbon doesn't have the File tab. As with the Windows 2016 preview, on the Mac the applications are color-coded: Blue for Word, green for Excel and red for PowerPoint.Also missing in the Mac version is one of the more useful features of the Windows version: A box on the far right of the ribbon with the text, "Tell me what you want to do." Type in a task, and you get walked through doing it via options and menus. You then have the choice of opening a file on OneDrive or on your local Mac.If you choose to open a OneDrive file, you get the same Office-like interface. When you choose File / Open or press Command-O, you see a screen that is clearly designed to be like every other Office screen, with the same colors, size of icons and so on. You have a choice of opening or saving files either to the cloud-based OneDrive or on your Mac's hard disk.It took me a little while to get used to the somewhat confusing OneDrive interface. But it's a shortcoming of the Mac version of Office, even if it's only a minor one.Microsoft has been integrating its cloud-based service OneDrive into both Windows and Office, and so, as you would expect, access to OneDrive is built right into Office 16 for the Mac. It may be that they're hidden so deeply I couldn't find them. That's not exactly real-time collaboration. You don't see the changes your collaborator makes until she saves the document, and she won't see your changes until you save it. In theory it sounds nice in practice, I wasn't impressed. But there are other changes as well.There is now a somewhat awkward collaboration feature that lets two people work simultaneously in the same document. You likely will as well.As with the other Office applications, the main thing that's new about Word is the interface. However, after a few times I got used to dealing with it. Being a long-time Windows Excel user, I found this saved me a great deal of time on the Mac. But don't worry - there's no need to abandon the old Mac Excel shortcuts, because it recognizes them as well. You can also navigate by the kinds of changes you've made to the document, such as comments and formatting.One of the most welcome additions to Excel is that it now recognizes most Windows keyboard shortcuts. Click the icon again to make it go away.Word 2016 also adds another useful new pane, the Navigation pane, which lets you navigate through a document via search results, headings and page thumbnails. To use it, go to the Home tab and click the Styles Pane icon on the upper right of the screen - and the pane appears. It's easy to overlook, because it's available only on the Home tab. With it, while you're projecting a presentation, your audience will see the current slide, while you'll also see your notes, the next slide and a timer. You can't build pivot charts in Excel, which is unfortunate, because they're a great way to present complex information at a glance, and are useful when creating dashboards meant to display a great deal of data at once.PowerPoint has gotten the same kind of collaboration features as Word and suffers from the same limitation - it's not true real-time collaboration because changes don't show up until the person you're collaborating with saves them.The new Presenter view may be PowerPoint's best new feature.On the plus side, I found the new Presenter view an excellent addition. But I found it just the slightest bit entertaining, and I, for one, can use all the entertainment I can get when I'm using a spreadsheet.Not everything is rosy in this new version of Excel, though. Will this change your life? Far from it. A number of new statistical functions have also been added, such as moving averages and exponential smoothing.Less importantly, when you click on a cell, your cursor essentially glides over to it in an animated way, like it does on the Windows 2013 version of Excel. With slicers, you create buttons that make it easy to filter data in a pivot table report, with no need to resort to drop-down lists. Microsoft autoupdate for mac 2011 is not workingAnd it's also great for adding multiple animations to a slide, because you can use the pane to easily change the order of the animations, delete animations and add news ones.If you feel that Apple Mail is purgatory, Outlook 2016 will be a must-have. I found it exceptionally useful because it let me control pretty much everything about animations in slides, including customizing the duration of the animation, whether to play sound along with it, and a number of effects options.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorJoshua ArchivesCategories |