
Microsoft Office 2016 16.12
Microsoft has released version 16.12 of its Office 2016 application suite with improvements to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint offer better sharing and collaboration, with your locally synced OneDrive documents now opening directly from the cloud. All four apps now let you insert and edit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files. Otherwise, Outlook sees the most changes, gaining quicker access to calendar event details, highlighting of search terms in results, week numbers in the Calendar month view, and delegate-driven scheduling of Skype meetings on behalf of principals. Finally, Microsoft AutoUpdate now supports the msupdate command-line tool. ($149.99 for one-time purchase, $99.99/$69.99 annual subscription options, free update through Microsoft AutoUpdate, release notes, 10.10+)
There continue to be some problems with Office 2016 version 16.12 on the Mac. If you visit the MS discussions you’ll see a wide variety. What concerned me were problems with Excel: disappearing macros (!), erratic macro execution, crashing, corrupted recovered files.
There is some good advice there, and MS is listening to suggestions.
On a brighter note, from the suggestions, MS is going to bring back the sorely missed auto-sum feature, where you can create a formula to add non-adjacent cells by typing an equals sign, then clicking on them individually, and Excel inserts a plus operator automatically between them. This has been normal behaviour for a very long time, and it took much voting and commenting in the Microsoft online community to request the resurrection of this feature for Macs.