Office for Mac gets keytips

Microsoft Office 365 for Mac is getting KeyTips for faster ribbon navigation from the keyboard in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

It’s another “About Bloody Time” late innovation from Microsoft. Office for Windows has Keytips since Office 2007, it’s only taken Microsoft over 15 years to do the same for their paying Mac customers.

Keytips in Office for Mac works much the same as in Windows, except the starting key is Option.  Press Option (instead of Alt) then next keys to press appear as tips on the screen beside their labels or buttons.

For example: Option, N, I opens the Insert | Link dialog in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

See our guide to Office KeyTips for the complete lowdown.

Leave keytips

Cancel out of KeyTips by:

• Mouse clicking somewhere on the screen OR
• Pressing Option button again OR
• Press Esc, for reasons passing understanding, see below.

Differences to Office for Windows

According to Microsoft

“You might be familiar with KeyTips on your Windows PC, and they function the same way on a Mac.”

That’s not true, there are some key differences in the way keytips work in Office for Mac.

• The Esc key cancels out of keytips completely instead of going back one step.  That appears to be a deliberate choice by Microsoft, though it’s hard to understand why.
• Outlook for Mac (not even the ‘new’ Outlook) get keytips.
• It’s NOT possible to combine the first level keys in Office for Mac.  In Office for Windows you can press both Alt and a letter together (e.g. Alt + N for Insert) but not in Office for Mac.  That’s understandable because many Option + letter combos are macOS system level shortcuts (e.g. Option + N inserts a tilde ~)

Who gets it?

Keytips is now available in the English language releases to the Beta Insiders users of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for Mac v16.86 build 24052212 and later.

Other languages will be supported before public release.

KeyTips are your way to faster Microsoft Office

Fast highlighting using two keyboard shortcuts in Word
Paste Text Only gets a Word shortcut and confusion