Microsoft Office for Mac 16.54
Microsoft has released version 16.54 of Office for Mac, bringing a more modern commenting experience to Word with improved @mentions and keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft has now aligned its commenting approach across all Office desktop and Web apps (including Excel and PowerPoint), as well as between macOS and Windows. Comments now require that you click the Post Comment or Post Reply button or use the Command-Enter shortcut, and resolved comments move to the Comments pane to provide better focus. Outlook also receives new voice commands for sending mail and setting @mentions. ($149.99 for a one-time purchase, $99.99/$69.99 annual subscription options, free update through Microsoft AutoUpdate, release notes, macOS 10.14+)
Considering Microsoft says they support the most recent three macOS versions, which goes back to Mojave when they released it, I’m wondering if really they built Office 2021 starting at Monterey, and back two versions.
I’ve tried to install it twice now on my iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2017) running 10.14.6, and can’t get it to ‘take’ - beach balling (‘not responding’) out the wazoo for long periods of time (5-15 minutes and longer, no doubt, if I didn’t Force Quit), having to “Activate” individual apps numerous times, and, then discovering, when disconnected from the interwebs, I was unable to edit and save documents. The long waits may be partially due to my relatively slow internet connection via satellite ISP (advertised @ 25 Mbps download)
I have yet to contact Tech Support - waited roughly an half hour for them on the phone before I ‘force quit’ the call
Has anyone successfully installed it on a Mojave box?
On the plus side, I got to test my cloned backups ala Carbon Copy Cloner when I restored my system after failing to install Office 2021… and October is Test Your Backup month Y/N?
I just want to warn that the Office for Mac 16.54 update killed Time Machine on my iMac running Mojave, as I mentioned last week.
What happened is that the update changed so many files in the 5 Office apps that when backupd did the “preparing backup” phase, it exceeded the kernel memory page limit. Whenever Time Machine ran, backupd would get to about 110 GB of memory, the total swap file size would reach around 48 GB, and the kernel would kill backupd due to low swap space.
I’d be interested to know if this happens to anyone else. You could avoid it by updating the apps one at a time, running Time Machine in-between. If you hit the problem, the only way to get Time Machine to work again is to delete a couple Office apps, run Time Machine, and then you can add them back. Note that when you add them back it won’ take much memory because it is adding back the entire .app folder, rather than needing to analyze individual file changes within the app.
(I bet it would work to rename the Office apps, run Time Machine, rename them back, run Time Machine again.)