Microsoft Office for Mac 16.63
Microsoft has released version 16.63 of Office for Mac with enhancements for Excel and Outlook. The Excel update improves support for auto-complete lists with screen readers like VoiceOver and reduces memory usage to speed up formula entry, particularly for larger cell ranges and devices with slower memory. Outlook adds support for the S/MIME email protocol to use Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) labels for classification and protection needs. ($149.99 for a one-time purchase, $99.99/$69.99 annual subscription options, free update through Microsoft AutoUpdate, release notes, macOS 10.15+)
And still there is no proper AppleScript support. At least a super simple script to get the accounts fails.
While I received great technical support from Microsoft’s Chat Online Support (no phone support that I could find) to help me uninstall Office for Mac Home & Business 2021 Lifetime License to upgrade 2019, even before upgrading to 2021 from 2019, with the update vs upgrade, 16.63 turned my Outlook email client into a spinning beachball for nearly every procedure, i.e., replies, attachments, insert photographs, and other operations that used to respond without delays of a spinning beachball that goes on for over a minute. In fact with each update Outlook is getting clumsier and clunkier. Could it be just my Monterey build? Prior updates were never great and making Outlook less and less efficient and easy to get things done. But 16.63 is absolutely the worst. I also lost the search feature when upgrading to 2021 from 2019. But Outlook tech support from the Help tab in Outlook provided two Terminal commands and a restart and a wait time after the restart of an hour (I waited many) and the two commands restored the search function for emails and contacts. I have been noticing that Outlook for Mac is not progressing into a facile email client. I have been an Office user for many decades starting back with Windows and a PC and then switching over to Apple in 2008 and starting anew with Office for Mac 2008 and continuing. But Outlook with this build has ruined my experience and turned the program into a terrible build requiring delays and spinning beach balls. I’ll have to confer with technical support to find out what is triggering a spinning beach ball whenever I want to execute a typical email operation. Sorry for the rant. I am losing patience with the development of Outlook and its progress.
Count your blessings…
I remember the days when the Mac version of Microsoft Office documents were incompatible with Windows versions of the same document. This was in the days when people would type their email message into a Microsoft Word document and mail the document. That made the Mac incompatible with business.
There seems to be a real big problem with signatures disappearing in 16.63. Sigs for all of my accounts (and there are many) disappeared and the Signatures preference section won’t allow you to make a new one (for any account). The support thread suggests switching back to the Legacy Outlook version and seeing of sigs are still there (haven’t tried yet, but will report my experience).
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/mac-outlook-1663-signature-issue/b190ced3-b2fb-44c8-9929-92b2ea8bf530
Good news — switching back to the Old Outlook (confirming there were signatures available) and then switching back to the New Outlook Hotness brought back the sigs (as well as a lot of untitled ones).