Microsoft Office 2015 (2016?)

One question to other Word 2016 users, or generally people that are more experienced with Word than I am.

I generally tend to write most things in Helvetica Neue Light. However, in Word I cannot select individual styles like I can in Pages. Of course I can go through the hassle of going into the Styles Drawer or the Font menu... but that I cannot seem to perform this using the Ribbon alone... seems like either a bug or an odd limitation. Any comments/ideas on that?

Oh I just realized that Office 2013 does also not offer this. And it's interface is ugly as hell... with buttons bleeding into each other with basically no boundaries... yikes.

If I recall correctly in Word 2011 you could AT LEAST from the font selector use the little arrow pointing to the side... to select different styles.

maflynn said:

I find Excel to be slower then on my Surface Pro 3, I'm not sure if this is due to software bloat or because its a beta. My SP3 is a slower computer then my rMBP, apps like Lightroom and DXO Optics pro fly on my rMBP but are a bit slow on my SP3. The exact opposite occurs between my rMBP and SP3 with Excel.

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That's disappointing.

Granted, it isa beta, but it's pretty far along in the beta cycle. I'd think they would have added more performance optimizations. There's no reason Excel shouldn't fly on a rMBP or at least match your Surface Pro 3's performance.

That Surface Pro 3 is looking more and more like a good mobile device solution.

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TheralSadurns said:

One question to other Word 2016 users, or generally people that are more experienced with Word than I am.

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Have you tried clicking the "Styles Pane?" In Office 2011 that brings up a a little Windows with style controls like an inefficient version of the Pages '09 styles drawer.

Is there any sort of dark mode at all?

I find staring at a white digital paper on a white background with a white ribbon a little too bright.

Traverse said:

Is there any sort of dark mode at all?

I find staring at a white digital paper on a white background with a white ribbon a little too bright.

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Sadly... no dark mode or other skin to talk of right now. On the bright side, however, (no pun intended) Office 2016 does not burn in my eyes. It is... after all... at least a shade of gray, rather than pure white.

Office 2013 though... oh god... when I first laid eyes on it I was literally blinded.

Which generally makes me wonder... people on this forum seem to love Office 2013 and hate 2011.
Yes 2011 was slow and buggy. But 2013?! The default was way too bright. Okay... that could be fixed.
But the missing menu bar?! And the horrible monstrosity of a file menu?!
Don't get me started...

TheralSadurns said:

Sadly... no dark mode or other skin to talk of right now. On the bright side, however, (no pun intended) Office 2016 does not burn in my eyes. It is... after all... at least a shade of gray, rather than pure white.

Office 2013 though... oh god... when I first laid eyes on it I was literally blinded.

Which generally makes me wonder... people on this forum seem to love Office 2013 and hate 2011.
Yes 2011 was slow and buggy. But 2013?! The default was way too bright. Okay... that could be fixed.
But the missing menu bar?! And the horrible monstrosity of a file menu?!
Don't get me started...

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Heh, I agree. I don't really like Office 2013's navigation. It's unintuitive.

MacUpdate reporting a download for 15.8.1 Office. I am not seeing anything in my Auto-Update.
Anyone know what the story is? I know Outlook already went to 15.8.1 So it could get messy with staggered app updates like this. Unless these individually updated do not receive an update.

iCletus said:

MacUpdate reporting a download for 15.8.1 Office. I am not seeing anything in my Auto-Update.
Anyone know what the story is? I know Outlook already went to 15.8.1 So it could get messy with staggered app updates like this. Unless these individually updated do not receive an update.

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Last updates I saw were for Excel 15.8.1 (the update file is around 585Mb) which fixes an issue where you could not mouse click a cell edit, and only keyboard navigation worked. That apparently has been fixed although I never saw the issue. Outlook is up to 15.8.1 but I'm not testing it.

Also, Microsoft Autoupdater was updated to 3.0.4 but I don't know what was changed. Autoupdater blew up to 40Gb of virtual memory when I tried to update Excel so I had to kill it and find a manual update.

The updates are available here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3048177

Yes, I downloaded those updates already. I was just wondering what MacUpdate is reporting then?

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7884/microsoft-office-preview

Word 2016

A few observations after running Word 2016 for a few weeks.

1) No smooth scrolling (aka rubber band effect) under any view mode

2) In the general ribbon, cannot type in name of font to switch to that font

3) Times New Roman font not installed by default (wow)

4) OneDrive integration is very slow, much easier to just save to local folder that is, in any case, connected to OneDrive

5) Found new option to compress all images in document to reduce size

Not sure if anyone else has experienced issues 1-4. Thanks.

cassini007 said:

3) Times New Roman font not installed by default (wow)

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I see it on mine, though it may have been there previously.

4) OneDrive integration is very slow, much easier to just save to local folder that is, in any case, connected to OneDrive

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Its uploading the file to the cloud as opposed to saving it to the local drive. My SP3 does the same thing.

maflynn said:

Its uploading the file to the cloud as opposed to saving it to the local drive. My SP3 does the same thing.

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That's funny. Yeah, you'd think it would be smart enough to interface and know if the drive you're saving to is synced with OneDrive, and if so, just save to it and then let OneDrive sync in the background.

JuryDuty said:

That's funny. Yeah, you'd think it would be smart enough to interface and know if the drive you're saving to is synced with OneDrive, and if so, just save to it and then let OneDrive sync in the background.

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The difference is that on windows its not saved on the local drive, its stored completely in the cloud. Its a nice feature to have all my files sitting up there and not consuming local disk storage. The mac version of OneDrive and the new version of Office does not quite work that well (yet).

maflynn said:

The difference is that on windows its not saved on the local drive, its stored completely in the cloud. Its a nice feature to have all my files sitting up there and not consuming local disk storage. The mac version of OneDrive and the new version of Office does not quite work that well (yet).

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It's not saved on your local drive at all? Is that an option you set? Just a few months ago when I was 100% on the PC side of things, OneDrive essentially just synced whatever folders you wanted, but it was on your local drive as well as the cloud.

Personally, I prefer to have both (or at least the choice) so I can access my most-used files even when I'm without an Internet connection.

On the Mac, I have all my Office files synced, but then I have several folders of files that are in the OneDrive cloud exclusively, just in case I ever need them but don't want them taking up local disk space.

JuryDuty said:

It's not saved on your local drive at all? Is that an option you set? Just a few months ago when I was 100% on the PC side of things, OneDrive essentially just synced whatever folders you wanted, but it was on your local drive as well as the cloud.

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There's a pointer file sitting there (taking no space) and it shows online-only. If you want to have it on your local drive, right click and say Make Available for Offline

maflynn said:

View attachment 536965
There's a pointer file sitting there (taking no space) and it shows online-only. If you want to have it on your local drive, right click and say Make Available for Offline

Image

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That's cool. Yes, they should add that to the Mac version too, if they can. Would be handy to see my list of files locally that I have in OneDrive. Currently, I have to launch my browser to see/get to what's out there.

maflynn said:

There's a pointer file sitting there (taking no space) and it shows online-only. If you want to have it on your local drive, right click and say Make Available for Offline

Image

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Microsoft has been getting some flack from their customers about that... it gets confusing when there is no network connection. There have been reports that OneDrive for Windows 10 includes support for selective syncing like the OSX client has.

maflynn said:

There's a pointer file sitting there (taking no space) and it shows online-only. If you want to have it on your local drive, right click and say Make Available for Offline

Image

Click to expand...

Off topic:
You doing martial arts, my friend?!

TheralSadurns said:

Off topic:
You doing martial arts, my friend?!

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How do you think the moderators will keep MacRumors in line?

sracer said:

Microsoft has been getting some flack from their customers about that... it gets confusing when there is no network connection. There have been reports that OneDrive for Windows 10 includes support for selective syncing like the OSX client has.

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I know they have, and I came across some chatter that this "feature" may go away. I hope not, because for me, its very useful.

TheralSadurns said:

Off topic:
You doing martial arts, my friend?!

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I study a blended combination of Karate, which includes Kempo, Goju and Jujitsu .

maflynn said:

I know they have, and I came across some chatter that this "feature" may go away. I hope not, because for me, its very useful.

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Are you referring to selective sync? They would be foolish to get rid of that, but they should have a more straightforward implementation. I don't like how using OneDrive on Windows 8 makes you update your account to an "online" account. I just want to use it like a Dropbox folder.

They changed how its working in windows 10, which has sparked outrage. I personally like how windows 8 handles this, but it looks like windows 10 is altering this. I don't have the win10 beta installed, so I cannot see how it actually works.

Outlook 15.8.2 updated through Autoupdate.

iCletus said:

Outlook 15.8.2 updated through Autoupdate.

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Did you click the link for the release notes? When I did it went to a page not found error. Was wondering what the actual release notes say.

The one bug that seems fixed is the Outlook calendar bug where it shows events in the time zone of the other user when scheduling a meeting. Events that myself and another were both invited to were showing at different times.

Outlook 15.8

heathpitts said:

Did you click the link for the release notes? When I did it went to a page not found error. …

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Ah, that problem is not specific to the preview (prerelease). Sometimes Microsoft is careless about existence/availability of release notes for released versions of Office for OS X.

What's the URL?

If you're lucky the notes will be properly linked/available within a day or so.

Also

Office Preview with Outlook 15.8 Crashing – Solution - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki (2015-03-31)

Is there anyway to backup emails on Outlook 15.8? I see nowhere to export to a .pst like in other versions of Outlook.