Microsoft makes available for download the first preview of Office 2016 for Mac users. Although, there has been other releases such as Office for iPad, OneNote for Mac and iOS, and even an Outlook version of iOS, which can be considered the best mail client for Apple users. The software giant is releasing the first preview of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook, which represent a major release for the platform.
Office 2016 for Mac shares the same look and feel as the Office experience users get on Windows, but it also includes a design that takes advantage of the features only found on a Mac computer. For starters, the new suite of apps have full retina display support and every icon looks beautiful even in the new 5K retina display Macs.
Universal Office apps: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint ready for download in Windows 10
As for features, Microsoft has overhaul the user experience, the ribbon menu is organized more intuitively, and there is a new task pane to makes it easier to position, resize, or rotate graphics.
Word
In Word 2016 for Mac, the design tab lets you manage layouts, colors and fonts, and the navigation page helps to refine the document structure and easily navigate to points of interests. Additionally, Word features threaded comments to improve document editing.
Excel
Excel 2016 for Mac includes a bunch of new improvements, such as charts, graphs, keyboard shortcuts, and data entry. The 2016 version of the spreadsheet application brings support for Excel 2013 (for Windows) functions to enable Mac users share files in different platforms. The new Analysis ToolPak provides additional functions and PivotTable Sliders to make data more meaningful and easier to find patterns.
PowerPoint
The new PowerPoint 2016 for Mac brings a new Presenter View feature to make it easy to control slides while projecting them in the big screen. There is a new animation pane to help build presentation faster and new slider transitions.
Outlook
The popular mail client, Outlook, brings improved conversations that automatically organizes your inbox around threaded conversations, and there is a new message preview, which displays the first sentence of an email below the subject line.
OneNote
OneNote 2016 for Mac uses new tags like “To Do”, “Important”, or “Question” to add structure to notes, and new search makes it easier to find things in your notes – OCR is also integrated to recognize text within images and handwritten notes.
Finally, Microsoft is adding cloud storage support to save files, which makes saving files locally and in OneDrive a bit different. The video below shows how Mac users will save files in Office 2016:
These are just a few of new features in Office 2016 for Mac, for more features information visit this Microsoft’s Office web page.
Mac users should be aware that the preview of Office 2016 is supported only on Mac OS X Yosemite version 10.10. Additionally, users currently running Office 2011 can try the new preview alongside the Office 2012.
The download is roughly 2.5GB in sizes and it will double the size occupied in the hard drive once its installed.
Microsoft is offering the preview to everyone who wants to try the software free of charge and the company is also looking for feedbacks to improve the product and add new features.
It took a while, but it’s finally here, Office 2016 for Mac is the first major update since 2011, even though the company has released various Office apps for the platform.
Source Microsoft | Featured picture credit: The Verge
