Microsoft Office for Mac gets Touch Bar support

PanARMENIAN.Net - The new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar arrived with some pretty strong first-party support, but it was clear that it would take some key partners to really make the secondary Retina Display sing, TechCrunch said. Photoshop compatibility arrived late-last year, and now Microsoft is finally ready to go live with Office support , which along with Adobe’s offering, was announced at launch, but not quite ready for prime time.

After some time testing with Microsoft Insider members, the functionality went live for the public February 16. The update brings second screen input to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, including some additional features that weren’t announced at the launch back in October.

The features are, naturally, already available in Apple’s comparable programs, like Pages and Keynote already have their own version of the functionality, largely targeted at text formatting. Google’s offerings, meanwhile, aren’t likely to see anything along these lines in the near future, being cloud-based offerings. At the moment, the Touch Bar’s Safari functionality is limited to the browser itself, rather than the pages and applications displayed in it, TechCrunch said.

Word Focus Mode hides all of the interface ribbons from the screen, monopolizing the display with a page, while all of the editing input moves down to the Touch Bar. From there, users can change the paragraph formatting and insert comments, links and photos.

In Excel, typing the equal sign in a cell will trigger Touch Bar functionality, bringing up the most recently used features. It also houses various formatting options like cell color and borders. Ditto for PowerPoint, which uses the Touch Bar for rotation and previewing thumbnails.