The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Word For Mac: A Review of Its Capabilities and Limitations

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Review Microsoft Word For Mac

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Excel received the most updates in the preview for Mac. Two new functions have been introduced and enabled for testing, namely XLOOKUP() and LET(). These functions will make it easier to sort through your data, especially when working with large spreadsheets.

Microsoft has opened up about plans to make every application run smoother, allowing older devices to seamlessly work with Office 2021 as well. Additionally, you can expect extensive Dark Mode support throughout the new suite, as it appeared in the Office LTSC preview of Word.

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Mac users of Office who have felt left out in the cold by Microsoft (because the last version, Office 2011 for Mac, was released in October 2010) now have reason to be pleased: The preview of Office 2016 for Mac attempts to bring the suite out of the dark ages and into the modern world.

Hints of what the new Office would offer have been out for a while, notably in the preview of Outlook, introduced in October 2014. But Mac owners have had to wait until earlier this month for the release of the full suite, including the core applications Word, PowerPoint and Excel. (The final version is due to ship this summer.)

The preview runs only on Yosemite OS X and is available for free to anyone. Be warned: It's a whopper of a download -- 2.66GB worth. Even so, I found installation to be exceptionally easy and problem-free.

Keep in mind, though, that this is a preview, and so you should be careful about using it for important work. I found all the applications to be stable, although one time I did have a problem saving a file -- Word froze and I had to use a Force Quit to close it. The file wasn't saved.

The moment you run any Office application in the preview, you know you've left the aging Office 2011 behind. It's less cluttered, cleaner and sleeker-looking, more logically organized, more colorful and simpler to use. That's largely in part because the Ribbon has been redone, and now looks and works as it does in the Windows version of Office.

In Office 2016, Microsoft is bringing a common look and feel to the suite across all platforms, which is why this Mac version looks much like the recently released Windows-based Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview. However, there are still some differences between the Mac and Windows Office previews. As with the Windows 2016 preview, on the Mac the applications are color-coded: Blue for Word, green for Excel and red for PowerPoint. However, in the Windows version, the color is applied to the title bar as well as the bar across the bottom of the screen. Not in the Mac version: The color is only at the bottom.

Microsoft has been integrating its cloud-based service OneDrive into both Windows and Office, and so, as you would expect, access to OneDrive is built right into this preview of Office 16 for the Mac. In the preview, you have a choice of opening or saving files either to the cloud-based OneDrive or on your Mac's hard disk.

A new animations pane is useful for creating and previewing animations in your presentations. I found it exceptionally useful because it let me control pretty much everything about animations in slides, including customizing the duration of the animation, whether to play sound along with it, and a number of effects options. And it's also great for adding multiple animations to a slide, because you can use the pane to easily change the order of the animations, delete animations and add news ones.

Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983,[9] under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems.[10][11][12] Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including: IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T UNIX PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SCO Unix (1990), macOS (2001), Web browsers (2010), iOS (2014) and Android (2015). Using Wine, versions of Microsoft Word before 2013 can be run on Linux.

In 1981, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi, the primary developer of Bravo, the first GUI word processor, which was developed at Xerox PARC.[13] Simonyi started work on a word processor called Multi-Tool Word and soon hired Richard Brodie, a former Xerox intern, who became the primary software engineer.[13][14][15]

Unlike most MS-DOS programs at the time, Microsoft Word was designed to be used with a mouse.[16] Advertisements depicted the Microsoft Mouse and described Word as a WYSIWYG, windowed word processor with the ability to undo and display bold, italic, and underlined text,[19] although it could not render fonts.[10] It was not initially popular, since its user interface was different from the leading word processor at the time, WordStar.[20] However, Microsoft steadily improved the product, releasing versions 2.0 through 5.0 over the next six years. In 1985, Microsoft ported Word to the classic Mac OS (known as Macintosh System Software at the time). This was made easier by Word for DOS having been designed for use with high-resolution displays and laser printers, even though none were yet available to the general public.[21] It was also notable for its very fast cut-and-paste function and unlimited number of undo operations, which are due to its usage of the piece table data structure.[22]

Following the precedents of LisaWrite and MacWrite, Word for Mac OS added true WYSIWYG features. It fulfilled a need for a word processor that was more capable than MacWrite.[23] After its release, Word for Mac OS's sales were higher than its MS-DOS counterpart for at least four years.[13]

The second release of Word for Mac OS, shipped in 1987, was named Word 3.0 to synchronize its version number with Word for DOS; this was Microsoft's first attempt to synchronize version numbers across platforms. Word 3.0 included numerous internal enhancements and new features, including the first implementation of the Rich Text Format (RTF) specification, but was plagued with bugs. Within a few months, Word 3.0 was superseded by a more stable Word 3.01, which was mailed free to all registered users of 3.0.[21] After MacWrite Pro was discontinued in the mid-1990s, Word for Mac OS never had any serious rivals. Word 5.1 for Mac OS, released in 1992, was a very popular word processor owing to its elegance, relative ease of use, and feature set. Many users say it is the best version of Word for Mac OS ever created.[21][24]

The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers.[13] In 1991, Microsoft capitalized on Word for Windows' increasing popularity by releasing a version of Word for DOS, version 5.5, that replaced its unique user interface with an interface similar to a Windows application.[28][29] When Microsoft became aware of the Year 2000 problem, it made Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS available for free downloads. As of February 2021[update], it is still available for download from Microsoft's website.[30]In 1991, Microsoft embarked on a project code-named Pyramid to completely rewrite Microsoft Word from the ground up. Both the Windows and Mac OS versions would start from the same code base. It was abandoned when it was determined that it would take the development team too long to rewrite and then catch up with all the new capabilities that could have been added at the same time without a rewrite. Instead, the next versions of Word for Windows and Mac OS, dubbed version 6.0, both started from the code base of Word for Windows 2.0.[24]

With the release of Word 6.0 in 1993, Microsoft again attempted to synchronize the version numbers and coordinate product naming across platforms, this time across DOS, Mac OS, and Windows (this was the last version of Word for DOS). It introduced AutoCorrect, which automatically fixed certain typing errors, and AutoFormat, which could reformat many parts of a document at once. While the Windows version received favorable reviews (e.g., from InfoWorld[31]), the Mac OS version was widely derided. Many accused it of being slow, clumsy, and memory intensive, and its user interface differed significantly from Word 5.1.[24] In response to user requests, Microsoft offered Word 5 again, after it had been discontinued.[32] Subsequent versions of Word for macOS are no longer direct ports of Word for Windows, instead featuring a mixture of ported code and native code.

Word for Windows is available stand-alone or as part of the Microsoft Office suite. Word contains rudimentary desktop publishing capabilities and is the most widely used word processing program on the market. Word files are commonly used as the format for sending text documents via e-mail because almost every user with a computer can read a Word document by using the Word application, a Word viewer or a word processor that imports the Word format (see Microsoft Word Viewer).

Word Mobile is a word processor that allows creating and editing documents. It supports basic formatting, such as bolding, changing font size, and changing colors (from red, yellow, or green). It can add comments, but can't edit documents with tracked changes. It can't open password-protected documents; change the typeface, text alignment, or style (normal, heading 1); create bulleted lists; insert pictures; or undo.[96][97][98] Word Mobile is neither able to display nor insert footnotes, endnotes, page headers, page footers, page breaks, certain indentation of lists, and certain fonts while working on a document, but retains them if the original document has them.[99] In addition to the features of the 2013 version, the 2007 version on Windows Mobile also has the ability to save documents in the Rich Text Format and open legacy PSW (Pocket Word).[99] Furthermore, it includes a spell checker, word count tool, and a "Find and Replace" command. In 2015, Word Mobile became available for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile on Windows Store.[100] 2ff7e9595c