Microsoft Office for Mac 16.24
Microsoft has released version 16.24 of Office for Mac, updating the app icons “to reflect the simple, powerful, and intelligent experiences of Office.” Okay, then.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now provide recommendations based on your activity and what others are working on around you. Excel enables you to use relative references when recording a macro (so that the macro will apply relative to the active cell), improves the ribbon to make common tasks easier to find, and addresses an important security vulnerability. Outlook adds support for ATP Safe Links, and OneNote updates its navigation panes to improve access to notebooks, sections, and pages. ($149.99 for one-time purchase, $99.99/$69.99 annual subscription options, free update through Microsoft AutoUpdate, release notes, macOS 10.10+)
Also, Microsoft released Office 16.16.9 updaters for those customers who purchased Office for Mac 2015 and never made the transition that would enable them to utilize the current version of Office. (I don’t understand the numbering system, but I did install the 16.16.9 packages.)
Was this the right place to make this comment?
Do you have a url reference for that. My recollection is that there was never a 2015, just 2011 and 2016 and 2019.
I have no URL for Office for Mac 2015. I paid for it in August of 2014 and I have, for example, an updater named Microsoft_Excel_15.40.17110800_Updater. As far as I understand Microsoft’s naming convention, that would make it the 40th update to Excel from Office for Mac 2015, with a release date of 171108.
However, a search for “Office for Mac 2015” turned up a few hits that included 2015 in the URL, for example, https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/31/office-for-mac-2015/ and https://www.theverge.com/2014/10/29/7088589/office-for-mac-2015-screenshots-leaked.
I’ve never heard of anything between Office for Mac 2011 and 2016. Version numbers are a different thang.
I can find no mention on the MS web site about an Office for Mac 2015.
Wikipedia has a nice timeline showing the history of the different Office for Mac versions.
If shows no Office for Mac 2015. (Or any Office 2015. Windows didn’t have one, either.)
I was looking for a url for the “Office 16.16.9 updater” which you say was released (not Office 2015).
Ignore my url request, I see this update now on my machine. I think 16.16.9 is for the last version of Office that people running El Capitan can use. Those with more recent MacOS versions would be able to update to 16.24.
The 15 in Microsoft_Excel_15.40.17110800_Updater isn’t the year, it’s an index of major versions of Office. 2011 is 14, 2016 is 15, and 2019 is 16. If you go down to the Table of versions section in the Wikipedia article, it shows that. I assume that’s so a number can be assigned to an Office version for use internally at Microsoft (in source code control, bug tracking, etc.) long before marketing decides what year it’s going to be released as.
The TechCrunch and Verge articles were written before 2016 was released so the 2015 is just a guess by them as to the year, which turned out to be wrong (or maybe Microsoft initially called it 2015 but then renamed it to 2016 for release).
MS was saying publicly for a while that unless you get on the subscription path
new features would stop coming.
If you’re on the O365 subscription path you get a new release every month. And there are new features although Office has some many thing in it many people may not notice.
If you have a “buy it once and install it” or what is now called a perpetual license you are stopped at version 16.16.x with only security and major bug fixes being issued.
Not sure what they plan to do for the future. I suspect like Adobe they want everyone on the subscription model and will push hard for it. Which means the choices for buying flavors of Office will drop from 100 to only 50. For Macs.
Even with O365, you can’t get past 16.16 unless you are running 10.12 or later. 16.16 seems to be the last version of “2016", and 16.17 the first version of “2019”
The monthly updates do make it hard to notice new features. 16.20 last December quietly added font embedding to Word, which is really a major addition.
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With the latest release (April 19), of Office 2019 (Home), I have finally been able to activate the included programs, running OS10.12. It only took a month and a half of repeated downloads, installation and activation efforts by second tier Microsoft support to reach this point. This was described, perhaps reluctantly, as a significant problem for all new installations starting with the release in early March. When attempting to activate the Office programs, login would fail and once that was resolved the licenses could not be found.
It was claimed that the issue did not affect O365 or any installations on any systems running OS 10.14.
There is a problem with O365 and Mojave 10.14.4 (at least) on a 13” MBP 2016.
Periodically, when I try to open a Word doc, it will say I don’t have the permissions to open it - even though I created it and have used it recently.
Reinstalling Office or restarting my mac seem to work - but only for a few days.
Then I get the same error message. So far, Microsoft has not been able to solve.
David Tuma
In my experience, Word uses that permissions error as a stand-in for a whole bunch of problems that aren’t related to permissions. I know that doesn’t help explain things, but perhaps it would help you think in other directions about what might be going wrong.
The ability to customize the ribbon is available only with an Office 365 subscription ($70/year).
Is this 64 bit? (I’m still using Office 2011, never saw a reason to update until the “will stop working next Mac OS Release” warning…)
Actually…I gave up on Office. With us being retired Pages and Keynote serve as a more than adequate replacement for Word and Powerpoint so the only real issue was Excel…which was about 90% of our Office usage. I converted all of the ongoing worksheets we have over to Numbers and they’re just fine. Took a bit to get used to the different way that Numbers does things compared to Excel…but the learning curve was pretty quick for us. Even in Excel…we weren’t using 90% of the capabilities so upgrading Office didn’t make much economic sense.
We’ve been discussing this on other discussion lists. A huge number of Macintosh users either hate Microsoft, or they hate how much they overcharge for Office. But we need Office, mostly for compatibility with other Office users. We think that we’ve found an excellent alternative! (Our discussions have mainly involved Word. Things might be different for other components of the suite.)
FreeOffice (free)
It has a nicer interface than MS Word, and in my testing it has shockingly good compatibility with Word format files (both rendering and saving; much better than LibreOffice’s or Pages compatibility), and it’s absolutely free. It will run on OS X 10.15 when it is released. There is a commercial version with a few more features, but the free version is all that most folks will ever need. Since it’s free, it’s worth checking out. A few days after downloading the free version, the company will e-mail you an offer for the commercial version (SoftmakerOffice) for only $20. Which is entirely worth it if you like the free version, if for no other reason than to support the company.