Nate Anderson

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Nate Anderson

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Nate Anderson

Nate Anderson

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Microsoft has released version 16.20.18120801 of Office 365 for the Mac platform, bringing support for a couple of key Mac features introduced in September's macOS 10.14 Mojave release, as well as a number of small features and user experience improvements not related to Mojave.

The headline feature is, of course, dark mode support, which requires Mojave to work. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook all support Mojave's dark theme. Also related to Mojave, you can now use Apple's Continuity Camera feature to insert a photo directly from your iPhone's photos to a slide in PowerPoint.

The process for Continuity Camera is outlined in Microsoft's support documents thusly:

Take a photo and then add it.

Open an editable document on your Mac in PowerPoint.

Select where you want to insert the photo by control-clicking in the document.

Under the name of the iOS device you'll use to take the photo, select Take Photo.

On your iOS device, the camera app opens. Take a photo with it.

If you're satisfied with the captured image, tap Use Photo. (Or, if you want to try again, tap Retake.)

After a moment, the photo is inserted in the document on your Mac. You may now style, move, or resize it in any way you like.

It still faces the same limitations that we noted in our macOS Mojave review. As Ars contributor Andrew Cunningham noted:

You can only take standard photos—no square mode, no video modes, no filters, no HDR or Live Photo options—images are always sent to your Mac as jpegs rather than HEIF files to maximize compatibility, and images are saved at a lower-than-native resolution with the phone’s EXIF data stripped out.

Most of the notable additions that don't require Mojave are for Outlook. You can click on a meeting event in your calendar to see a list of attendees or disable forwarding of meeting invites by attendees to keep your meetings from ballooning to include people you don't want. There's also support for creating Microsoft Teams meetings directly from Outlook, the ability to share your calendar with other people, and a new multiple-time-zone view for the calendar for up to three time zones.

Microsoft also expanded the proofreading tools in PowerPoint with grammar suggestions. In Microsoft Word, you can now check a box labeled "Embed fonts in file" to make sure that your document looks as intended on the computers it's viewed on, even if the target computer didn't already have all the necessary fonts. This feature was already added to PowerPoint back in September.

Microsoft has updated Office 365 for Mac monthly for some time. Last month, the company added Web picture support directly in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; new mail encryption features for Outlook; and a new view in PowerPoint, called "summary zoom."

However, some major changes, like a total overhaul and redesign of Outlook, are still pending in future updates.

Listing image by Apple