Название: Office 2021 for Macs For Dummies
Автор: Bob LeVitus
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Программы
isbn: 9781119840473
isbn:
When you install the software, you don’t create a single app named Microsoft Office for Mac, nor is there a single folder that houses all the installed apps. Rather, you’ll find that each app is installed separately (in the Applications folder, by default); they’re easy to find, though, because each starts with the word Microsoft (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and so on). The lone exception is OneDrive, which is simply named OneDrive.
You may have more or fewer Microsoft Office apps in your Applications folder. The number depends on which edition of Office you purchased and which options you choose during installation.
The following list briefly describes the items that matter, focusing on what each one is or does. Note that some of these may not be in your installer package, depending on which version of Office you’ve purchased or subscribed to:
Microsoft OneNote: OneNote is a free-form digital note-taking app that can be used to house those great inspirations that pop into your brilliant mind from time to time.
Microsoft Excel: Excel is the number-crunching member of the Office family. You use this program to create spreadsheet documents.
Microsoft Teams: Teams is a video-conferencing and collaboration tool designed for organizational communications. It’s very much like Zoom and other such apps, but with a familiar Microsoft flair.
Microsoft Outlook: Microsoft Outlook is the Swiss army knife of Microsoft Office apps — it includes not one, not two, but five separate functions. It’sAn email clientAn address bookAn appointment calendarA task and to-do list managerA repository for notes
Microsoft PowerPoint: PowerPoint is the presentation-creating member of the Office family. You use it to create slide shows.
Microsoft Word: Word is, of course, the Office word processing program. But it’s much more than that these days because you can use it to create almost any document that contains text or images or both.
OneDrive: It seems that more and more apps and traditionally computer-focused functions are taking place in the cloud these days, meaning these things are web-based (living on the internet). OneDrive is Microsoft’s version of cloud-based storage and is similar to Apple’s own iCloud service. You can find out more in Chapter 3 about using OneDrive, Microsoft’s free, cloud-based file storage service, for collaboration, co-authoring, and backups.
Microsoft AutoUpdate: It's important to keep your Microsoft apps updated and in tip-top shape. AutoUpdate keeps you in the update loop by automatically checking for updates periodically and even updating apps automatically, if you so choose.
What’s New and Good
Microsoft Office for Mac has many new or improved features, but perhaps the most important one is that the suite is now coded to run natively (although thankfully not exclusively) on Macs that have Apple Silicon processors. Office apps are also built for Macs with Intel processors. The installer app will know which version your computer needs during installation.
The system requirements have changed, too. Microsoft supports the three most recent versions of macOS. When a new major version (not an incremental update) of macOS is released, Microsoft picks up support for it and drops support for the oldest. As of this writing, Office for Mac is supported for macOS Monterey, Big Sur, and Catalina. When a newer version of macOS is released (a major version is typically released on an annual basis in the fall), Microsoft will support it, Monterey, and Big Sur, and drop support for Catalina.
We’ll stop calling the suite Office for Mac now and refer to it as just plain ol’ Office. Because you're reading this book, you should be using Office on a Mac. If you aren’t a Mac user, you’re reading the wrong book.
There’s a lot more to Office, so let’s get to it. We start by describing what’s new and good in the latest version of Office and continue with major new features common to most or all of the programs that make up the suite. After that, you look at new features and improvements specific to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. The section concludes with a short rant on what’s bad or ugly in this release.
The suite life
All Office apps have received facelifts, so that’s a good thing all around. They still look very macOS-like but incorporate the coloring and themes of their Windows counterparts to make it easy to switch between platforms and still feel a sense of familiarity. Figure 2-1 shows you the ribbon’s Home tab for Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Note the color assigned to the Quick Access toolbar for each; these are the same colors used for each app in Windows, iOS, and Android.
You can enable or disable certain ribbon features or change the order of its tabs by choosing App Name ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Ribbon & Toolbar from the menu at the top of the screen in every app.
FIGURE 2-1: The ribbon’s Home tab as seen in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively.
Throughout this book, we examine some of the new features available throughout Office. For now, here's an overview :
Co-authoring: Now multiple users can collaborate simultaneously on a single Office document using different computers (Macs or PCs). Updates made by other people appear on your screen in real time, and you can choose to be alerted whenever other document collaborators are present. To use real-time co-authoring, you and your collaborators must store shared files in OneDrive. This feature doesn't work with the LTSC version of Office. LTSC, which stands for Long Term Servicing Channel, is available only for commercial or government clients.
SharePoint and OneDrive: All Office apps support not just one but two Microsoft cloud storage services. You can open and save documents stored on either cloud from a Mac or a PC or one of the Office web apps. Microsoft offers 5 gigabytes of free online storage space when you sign up for its free OneDrive service at https://onedrive.com/
. (This is the same amount as Apple’s basic version of iCloud but a mere bagatelle compared to Google Drive’s 15GB for a basic free account.) When you store documents on your free OneDrive, you can not only open them using Office on a Mac or PC but also edit them in a web browser using one of the Office web apps. If you need more than 5GB of storage, you’ll need to sign up for Microsoft 365, where you can get up to 1TB (or 1,000GB!) of storage.
Office for the web apps: Open an Office document without a copy of Office? You betcha. If the file is stored on your (free) OneDrive, you can open and edit it in a web browser, as shown in Figure 2-2. This feature isn’t exactly new but has been updated immensely.FIGURE 2-2: The Office.com version of Word looks suspiciously like its Mac and PC siblings.
AutoSave: If your document is stored in OneDrive, СКАЧАТЬ