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You need to be using the new Outlook for Mac, and there's a setting in Outlook Preferences, under General. I think it should be enabled by default though. (Also make sure you don't have 'Reduce transparency' enabled in macOS's Accessibility settings, under Display.)

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Outlook on the iPhone or iPad still has sort of the bubble effect though. I think it has gotten better, but it annoys me when someone puts their responses in someone else's email...makes it hard to see the whole thing.

But I see now this new Outlook does, indeed, handle it the same as Windows Outlook — which, assuming it's to be a totally cross-platform (Electron) app, makes perfect sense.
 
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The problem with the Office 20## product line is that MS wants to push its subcription model, so it makes Office 20## the poor man's version of MS 365 by not updating it with significant new features, causing rapid obsolesence.

For instance, one of the most significant recent improvements in Excel was the introduction of dynamic array formulas (according to MS, these were introduced in Oct 2018). They make it far simpler to write formulas that operate on an array as a whole (as opposed to just one cell). Yet Office 2019 can't use dynamic array formulas, because it never received this update. Thus files produced using these won't fully work in Office 2019.

Strikingly, this meant MS concurrently produced two different version of Excel (365 and 2019) whose files were partially incompatible. This makes things very inconvenient for users of both product lines, since it means workbooks can't be fully shared between them. This is much more serious than a lack of backwards compatibility; it's a lack of curent compatibility.
 
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I really try to not use office but I have to sometimes for work. I guess it's good MS keeps the mac suite updated!
They should update Office 2008 as well. Planned obsolescence on their part. Shows that Microsoft is very evil and greedy.
 
I'm surprised of the bashing, especially regarding Excel. It is an excellent program and useful to me every single day. Perhaps people are using it for tasks it wasn't meant for?

My excel 2011 is what keeps me on Mac Os 10.14.

Absolutely agree. Excel is the only reason I purchase Office and it is the only application in the suite for which I haven't yet found a better replacement. Of course since I have to purchase Office anyway, I do use Word and Powerpoint as my main applications. But I do feel there are other better/comparable alternatives to those two.

On a side note - I recently upgraded my Office 2011 to 2019. I was happy to find that Excel was quite a bit snappier and more response in 2019. If you are a heavy Excel user, it might be worth the upgrade from 2011 to 2019 or 2021.
 
Has been M1 native for quite some time
Well... Temas is not. Terrible software.
I hate to break it to you, but Outlook is being ported to Electron, effectively becoming a web app. I am guessing it will end up resembling Microsoft Teams, which I really hate using.

There is hope at the horizon.... bye bye Electron, Teams will never eat up my machine again yeah:

 
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They should update Office 2008 as well. Planned obsolescence on their part. Shows that Microsoft is very evil and greedy.
You serious? Microsoft doesn't really distinguish anymore and offers the same function and technology to Mac-users as they do to Windows users. You can agree about the quality of that software, but I think this is VERY mature for a company that used to be a monopolist forcing you to use Windows.
 
We are very happy with out family Office 365 subscription. It basicslly is a 6TB online storage plan with MS Office as a gift.

We use Macs and PCs, mostly OneNote, Word and Excel in collaboration and it is very stable.

Actually, OneDrive steadily has replaced our iCloud subscription, which in reliablity terms is going slowly downhills.

I big plus is high platform independence.
 
The Apple iWork suite of office apps after the redesign 5 years ago or so has been a piece of useless crap that should have been discontinued by now. That’s why it’s free. No one would pay for those apps if Apple continued to charge for them as they did in the past before they redesigned those apps.

What Apple should have done is base its redesigned suite of Office apps on LibreOffice / OpenOffice and add support for the iWorks file types for backward compatibility with iWorks.

Even though LibreOffice works in MacOS, its UI is terrible on the Mac. However, there is a Mac friendly port of LibreOffice called NeoOffice (it’s not free, but it’s cheap) supported by two part-time developers. It blows the Apple iWorks suite out of the water, even though it has its quirks, especially in Dark Mode.

Apple should pay the two guys $50 million, buy NeoOffice from them, and bring it to the polish that it deserves. If Apple did that, the Mac would finally get a decent and real alternative to MS Office.

When Apple went to the 64-bit only apps (in Catalina?) my old MS Office 2011 no longer worked. So, I searched for alternatives and found LibreOffce and NeoOffice. I’ve been using NeoOffice for 3 years now. The learning curve to use as a seasoned pro any part of it - alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint - is just a matter of a few minutes, as long as you know MS Office (especially MS Office for Windows 2010 and for Mac 2011 or earlier). Most menus and options are very similar to the old layout of MS office before Microsoft made MS Office almost unusable with all the crazy UI.

The design ideas behind LibreOffice/NeoOffice are definitely based on the old Microsoft Office design dating back to MS Office 5 for DOS and MS Office 6 for Windows, which were very well thought-through Office applications. Microsoft veered away from that design in their MS Office 2013 and later, shifting menus to the most absurd places and creating the fat bar with options on top of the page (which can’t be turned off and which constantly changes its content, making the whole experience maddening). The MS Office 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac were the last versions that were still based on the original MS Office 5 and 6 design, and that’s what NeoOffice resembles very closely.

The fact that Apple still drags along iWorks is an embarrassment. That suite has been dead for years and with LibreOffice available for forking by anyone, including Apple, and NeoOffice available for sale (I’m sure $50 million would finalize that sale in about a week), Apple should FINALLY get serious about its Office suite after 20 years of floundering and falling farther and farther behind.

However, with the current Apple leadership, I’m not holding my breath. They really have no clue what businesses need. They must be smoking some very potent weed if they believe that the iWorks suite is business-worthy. The most the iWorks apps are useful for is typing up home-cooking recipes and doing some basic home budgeting. And thats about it.
 
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Apple should pay the two guys $50 million, buy NeoOffice from them, and bring it to the polish that it deserves. If Apple did that, the Mac would finally get a decent and real alternative to MS Office.



The fact that Apple still drags along iWorks is an embarrassment. That suite has been dead for years and with LibreOffice available for forking by anyone, including Apple, and NeoOffice available for sale (I’m sure $50 million would finalize that sale in about a week), Apple should FINALLY get serious about its Office suite after 20 years of floundering and falling farther and farther behind.
You’re really pushing for that $50 million. You wouldn’t be one of those two guys who develops NeoOffice? 😁
 
I agree with you in general, but the specific part I mentioned — the aggravating way Mac Outlook handles conversations/threads/what-have-you — is inferior to that of Windows Outlook.
I'll grant that I don't use the Mac version of Outlook (I'm a M365 subscriber on the Mac) - as Outlook (2016 on Windows 10) is still the most single-threaded piece of crap software I have ever encountered (Excel is a distant second with its memory management when switching between open documents). So I really don't know how the Mac version works in that (multi-threaded or not) manner.
 
LAUGH. Collaboration features never worked in Office 365, ever. If I opened up a document that somebody else had open, I immediately got an error stating that I had to close, and re-open, because there was a change to the document. If I made a change, and then tried to save, it failed, because it would say that the other person made changes (to other stuff) and that my changes were being discarded. This was on both Mac and Windows.

I find that collaboration has been getting fairly good in recent years.
 
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