When Apple’s MacBook Pro with Touch Bar debuted in October, it was noted that Microsoft was working on adding support for the Touch Bar to their Office suite of applications. The Redmond firm has now added the support to Office, and members of their “Office Insider” early beta team can try it out.
Touch Bar functionality is available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. In Word, users will be allowed to activate “Focus Mode” to remove the Ribbon for fewer distractions, as well as format text and change font styles via the MacBook Pro’s OLED strip.
Excel offers the ability to quickly pick recently used functions and color cells or pick out charts. PowerPoint offers a graphical overview of all the slides in a deck, allowing users to reorder slides.
Outlook offers a “Today” view in the Touch Bar, allowing users to quickly view calendar appointments for the day, as well as see recently viewed documents while composing emails, allowing users to quickly attach files. Skype will also make use of the Touch Bar, allowing calling functions to be set from the MacBook Pro’s OLED strip.
While the new Touch Bar features should be released to the general public in the coming months, those Office for Mac users who want to stay on the cutting edge — which could include the usual buggy software and possible data loss landmines — can sign up to become an “Office Insider” at the Microsoft Office website.
(Via The Verge)
