Microsoft Office for Mac 16.37
Microsoft has issued its monthly update of Office for Mac, adding a new way to search for commands and help in version 16.37 for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The Tell Me feature (accessed from the light bulb icon to the right of the tab names at the top of the window) enables you to enter words and phrases about tools you want to use or actions you want to perform. Excel also receives the Excel Ideas feature, which enables you to use natural language queries to ask questions about your data without having to write complicated formulas. PowerPoint improves the speed of reading large cloud files by downloading content in the background, and Word enables you to use speech-to-text (Home > Dictate) for hands-free typing. ($149.99 for a one-time purchase, $99.99/$69.99 annual subscription options, free update through Microsoft AutoUpdate, release notes, macOS 10.10+)
I got the update and the “tell me” or “light bulb icon” does not show for any of the 3 programs, Word, Excel or Powerpoint.
Do you have an O365 subscription? Like a number of Office application features, this one requires a subscription.
I wondered about that, no, I using download from MS. Thanks for letting me know.
I have the subscription version of Office and try to use it on Macs, iPad, and iPhones. I don’t see how people in the Apple universe can tolerate the difficulty of getting it to function in the iCloud realm. I feel “pushed” to use OneDrive by the workflow architecture and find it difficult to have my documents easily saved in iCloud. I don’t want a OneDrive account despite the free storage offered. For simple documents, I often fall back on Pages for its convenience in this regard, and convert the output to a Word doc if I’m sharing. Am I misunderstanding something about how to use Office cloud functions?
It’s a good question, and I suspect that this is one of those situations where trying to span ecosystems simply doesn’t work well. You’re best off if you focus all your efforts on iWork/iCloud, Office/OneDrive, or Google Docs/Drive. Trying to mix them is likely an exercise in frustration.