Office 2016 for Mac is getting some new features, first to Office for Mac Insiders and then to all Office 2016 for Mac users on an Office 365 plan. Mac customers even get a useful feature BEFORE Office for Windows … that doesn’t happen very often.
Shared Files
A new addition to the Open dialog in Word, Excel and PowerPoint – the Shared list.
It’s a list of documents that have been shared with you via supported cloud storage. This is already in Office for iPad, iPhone and Android. Presumably it’ll turn up in Office for Windows sometime.
It does not include documents you have shared with others, only ‘incoming’ shares. Surely two ‘Shared’ lists would be more useful – a list of docs the user has shared out to others, as well as the current ‘incoming’ share list?
Object Selection
A familiar part of Word for Windows is now in Word for Mac – the Selection Pane.
This shows the objects in the document and lets you select and rearrange them.
Interactive Controls
Content Controls like date pickers and drop down lists are now interactive.
OneNote for Mac
OneNote now has a Draw tab for ‘ink’ annotations and there’s ‘pen’ support for drawing tablets and screens.
To accompany drawing there are some lined and grid page options available.
The default font can be changed – hooray! Onenote | Preferences | Edit and View.
The Insert menu now has shapes so you can add neat lines, circles etc. instead of raggedy drawn ones.
According to Microsoft, adding a link to a video from YouTube, Vimeo etc will insert a playable preview but we could not see that in the current Insiders release.
64-bit Office 2016 for Mac
The Insiders ‘fast track’ Office for Mac can now try a 64-bit version of Office. Amazing that it’s taken this long for the Mac version to catch up. Office for Windows 64-bit has been available for many years.
Eventually 64-bit Office for Mac will be available to the ‘slow’ Insiders track and, with enough patience, you’ll see it released to the public.
The 64-bit beta is version 15.25 (160630).
Microsoft has some notes for users and developers on the transition to 64-bit Office for Mac.
