The Office 2016 Mac Preview is here!
Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office 365 Client Apps and Services team.
Today is a big day for the Mac community–we’re excited to announce that a preview of the new Office 2016 for Mac is now officially available! Click here to give it a try and please send us your feedback.
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.
Cloud connected with OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.
Similar to our recent announcements of universal Office apps for Windows 10 and Office for Android tablet, 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. 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.
Office 2016 for Mac—an exciting step forward
The new Office 2016 for Mac includes updated versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook–and the moment you open any one of the apps, you’ll immediately feel the difference. We’ve modernized the user experience and made it easier to get things done. The redesigned ribbon intuitively organizes features so you can quickly find what you need quickly. A refreshed task pane interface makes positioning, resizing, or rotating graphics easy so you can create exactly the layout you want. And new themes and styles help you pull it all together to produce stunning, professional documents.
Word—create, polish and share beautiful documents
Word’s state of the art editing, reviewing and sharing tools make authoring and polishing documents easy. The design tab 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.
Navigation pane
Excel—analyze and visualize your data in new and intuitive ways
With the new features in Excel, you’ll be telling your data’s story in no time. Charts, graphs, keyboard shortcuts and data entry enhancements (like formula builder and autocomplete) immediately make you more productive. And support for Excel 2013 (for Windows) functions ensures that you can easily share files across platforms. The new Analysis ToolPak offers a wide range of statistical functions, including moving averages and exponential smoothing, and PivotTable Slicers help you cut through large volumes of data to find patterns that answer questions.
Formula builder
PowerPoint—create, collaborate and effectively present your ideas
Walk into your next presentation with complete confidence. PowerPoint’s new Presenter View is like mission control for your presentation–displaying 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.
Presenter View
Outlook—enjoy a mail experience that works fast and looks great
Managing your email has never been easier. The recently released Outlook for Mac is also a part of the preview suite and uses push mail support to deliver an always-up-to-date inbox. The improved conversation view automatically organizes your inbox around threaded conversations, so you’ll never hunt for related messages again. And the new message preview gives you the first sentence of an email just below the subject line so you can quickly decide if you want to read it now or come back later.
Conversation view
OneNote—harness your thoughts in your very own digital notebook
Never forget again with OneNote. Capture, organize and share your ideas with digital notebooks that you can access on any device. Use tags like “To Do” or “Important” or “Question” to add structure to your notes, and find things quickly with a powerful search engine that tracks your tags, indexes your typed notes and uses OCR to recognize text in images and handwritten notes.
Tag your notes.
This March 25th Office Mechanics show includes an end-to-end demo of Office 2016 for Mac Preview.
Download the apps today!
As you can see, there’s a lot packed into this preview release, and we’re excited to share it with the world. 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.
We’re looking forward to hearing from the Mac community and will use the feedback to finalize the product for release later this summer.
— Kirk Koenigsbauer
