What’s New and Good
Microsoft Office for Mac has many new or improved features, but perhaps the most important one is that the suite is now coded to run natively (although thankfully not exclusively) on Macs that have Apple Silicon processors. Office apps are also built for Macs with Intel processors. The installer app will know which version your computer needs during installation.
The system requirements have changed, too. Microsoft supports the three most recent versions of macOS. When a new major version (not an incremental update) of macOS is released, Microsoft picks up support for it and drops support for the oldest. As of this writing, Office for Mac is supported for macOS Monterey, Big Sur, and Catalina. When a newer version of macOS is released (a major version is typically released on an annual basis in the fall), Microsoft will support it, Monterey, and Big Sur, and drop support for Catalina.
We’ll stop calling the suite Office for Mac now and refer to it as just plain ol’ Office. Because you're reading this book, you should be using Office on a Mac. If you aren’t a Mac user, you’re reading the wrong book.
There’s a lot more to Office, so let’s get to it. We start by describing what’s new and good in the latest version of Office and continue with major new features common to most or all of the programs that make up the suite. After that, you look at new features and improvements specific to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. The section concludes with a short rant on what’s bad or ugly in this release.
The suite life
All Office apps have received facelifts, so that’s a good thing all around. They still look very macOS-like but incorporate the coloring and themes of their Windows counterparts to make it easy to switch between platforms and still feel a sense of familiarity. Figure 2-1 shows you the ribbon’s Home tab for Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Note the color assigned to the Quick Access toolbar for each; these are the same colors used for each app in Windows, iOS, and Android.
FIGURE 2-1: The ribbon’s Home tab as seen in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively.
Throughout this book, we examine some of the new features available throughout Office. For now, here's an overview :
Co-authoring: Now multiple users can collaborate simultaneously on a single Office document using different computers (Macs or PCs). Updates made by other people appear on your screen in real time, and you can choose to be alerted whenever other document collaborators are present. To use real-time co-authoring, you and your collaborators must store shared files in OneDrive. This feature doesn't work with the LTSC version of Office. LTSC, which stands for Long Term Servicing Channel, is available only for commercial or government clients.
SharePoint and OneDrive: All Office apps support not just one but two Microsoft cloud storage services. You can open and save documents stored on either cloud from a Mac or a PC or one of the Office web apps. Microsoft offers 5 gigabytes of free online storage space when you sign up for its free OneDrive service at https://onedrive.com/. (This is the same amount as Apple’s basic version of iCloud but a mere bagatelle compared to Google Drive’s 15GB for a basic free account.) When you store documents on your free OneDrive, you can not only open them using Office on a Mac or PC but also edit them in a web browser using one of the Office web apps. If you need more than 5GB of storage, you’ll need to sign up for Microsoft 365, where you can get up to 1TB (or 1,000GB!) of storage.
Office for the web apps: Open an Office document without a copy of Office? You betcha. If the file is stored on your (free) OneDrive, you can open and edit it in a web browser, as shown in Figure 2-2. This feature isn’t exactly new but has been updated immensely.FIGURE 2-2: The Office.com version of Word looks suspiciously like its Mac and PC siblings.
AutoSave: If your document is stored in OneDrive, you can use the AutoSave feature to instantly save any changes you’ve made, as well as make those changes visible in real-time on other devices. This feature doesn't work on the LTSC version of Office. Many features mentioned in this section are available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel but not in Outlook. That’s because many of these new features are document oriented and Outlook is the only one of the four that doesn’t create its own documents.
Graphics galore: Office offers a slew of new images, icons, and other graphics, particularly via the web, to beautifully adorn your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Improved new document experience: Excel Workbook gallery, PowerPoint Presentation gallery, and Word Document gallery provide quick access to themes, templates, and recently used documents. Browse great-looking previews to see what your document will look like before you start working on it.
Improved performance: Don’t expect the Office apps to launch in under .005 seconds or to fetch your groceries, but they have been updated to open faster and to work more efficiently than previous versions.
Office has hundreds of other tweaks, fixes, new features, and improvements, including many streamlined dialog boxes, toolbars, and panes, and better media integration (with your pictures, movies, and music). We could probably write an entire book about all the new and improved capabilities in Office. But the boss says that we have to show you how to use everything, too, so we had best move along now.
The following sections provide overviews of new features specific to the big four Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Word
Word has been the primary tool we use to make a living for quite a while now (we’re talking decades here). Word still feels like Word but offers several enticing new features, such as
Enhanced dark mode: Dark mode was a feature in previous incarnations, but the actual document remained a stark white. Now, even the documents themselves utilize the dark background and themes, making dark mode that much easier on the eyes.
More colors in immersive reader view: The immersive reader view now supports several colors to help make things more interesting and allow for customization.
Better voices in read aloud mode: You now have more lifelike and natural-sounding voices to grace your ears when listening to Word read back the text of your documents while using read aloud mode.
PowerPoint
Among the new features in PowerPoint, a few stand apart from the rest:
Animated GIFs of slide shows: The latest version of PowerPoint for Mac allows you to save your presentations as animated GIFs, which make it easy to share via platforms such as social media.
Ink replay: Sometimes it’s fun (and even necessary) to use the Draw tab to draw on your slides to emphasize something. Wouldn’t it be cool if your audience could watch replays of you drawing (or “inking” as Microsoft calls it) on your slides?