Apple: Microsoft releases Office for Mac 2016 preview, including Outlook

Microsoft has released a preview version of Office for Mac 2016, ahead of an official release later this year, with email and personal information management package Outlook for Mac now included as part of the productivity suite.

The preview release, supported on machines running Mac OSX Yosemite (10.10), will be updated frequently until the final version is released and can work alongside Office for Mac 2011. Aside from integrating Outlook, the release is designed to make it easier to access documents across Microsoft’s OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint cloud services.

Key new features in Word include a revamped design tab, where users can manage layout, colours and fonts across a document, as well as a navigation pane that allows users to jump to key points in a document easily.

Excel includes improved cross-platform support for documents created in Excel 2013 for Windows, along with a range of new statistical functions such as moving averages and exponential smoothing.

Meanwhile, PowerPoint includes a new Presenter View that allows users delivering a presentation to see the current slide, the next slide, some notes and a timer, while only showing the current slide to the audience. It also includes a number of new slide transitions.

However, Microsoft warns some features included in the preview release aren’t final or may not work and users of the preview version should always make sure they’re using the most recent update.

Title image: PowerPoint’s Presenter View.