Among the third party developers early updating their apps with support for the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar is Microsoft – which, in a blog post, details how its revered Office apps Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook can be even easier to use on the high-end notebook unveiled yesterday.
In Word, the new Word Focus Mode lets users transfer the most relevant Word functions to the Touch Bar, in the process removing the main screen’s ribbons and commands for a less cluttered interface. Meanwhile, in PowerPoint, the Touch Bar can, thanks to the Reorder Objects button, display a map of all of a slide’s layers, thereby easing the process of finding and moving objects.
The Mac version of Excel lets users type an equals sign into a cell to instantly display the most recently used functions on the Touch Bar, while the Touch Bar can also speed up access to borders and cell colors. And, in the email client Excel, the Touch Bar can show commonly used commands. When composing an email, the Touch Bar will also list recent documents that can be tapped to attach.
Enhancements like these and Microsoft’s support for unique iOS features, including Touch ID, Split View and the Apple Pencil, in its mobile Office apps show that extensively utilizing the Office productivity suite doesn’t have to necessitate leaving the Apple ecosystem. In the new issue of AppleMagazine, we look at how else Apple’s various devices can work so well together.