Microsoft is on the verge of rolling out the Commercial preview of the Office 2019 for Mac users.
With the improvements to the Office Ribbon, users can expect a focus on working and collaborating with others in a more natural way. Microsoft is overhauling the interfaces of all the Office versions to bring a much more consistent look and feel across the various platforms that the applications support. There's now going to be a more "compact" view for the ribbon, with a collaboration view in the top right corner. You can see the new icons in the image above, and as with the simplified ribbon, we'll see these launch in Word for Office.com this month before arriving to Insiders using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Windows later in June.
Updates include the roaming pencil case and ribbon customizations across Office apps; focus mode in Word; Morph transitions, in-click sequence, and 4k video export in PowerPoint; new charts and functions in Excel; and focused inbox in Outlook. Like the simplified ribbon, the new colors and icons will first appear in the web version of Word. Starting in July, it will be available in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac in August. The new ribbon will be far more customizable, letting you add or remove any icon you want.
Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac previews improved inking features and more
Microsoft also is making search smarter by providing recommendations that officials said are "powered by AI" and the Microsoft Graph programming interfaces.
It sounds like these are just the first new features in a larger Office redesign. The features which the new update will carry resemble the ones found in the Office 365 subscription.The new Office 2019 for Mac will encompass features which will be liked by both the end users and the IT department. This smarter search box is already available in the Web apps, SharePoint Online, and Outlook mobile; in August it will also be coming to Outlook on the Web.
According to Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Office and Windows Marketing, these latest changes are based on three guiding principles- customers, context, and control. Once Microsoft collects feedback from those users, it will roll out the changes to everyone else. Created to make the apps look more modern, the new icons are built as scalable graphics "so they render with crisp, clean lines on screens of any size", Microsoft says.