Touch Bar Support Arrives for Office Insider Users

If you're beta testing Microsoft Office for Mac and have a Touch Bar MacBook Pro, you're in for a treat. A new version released yesterday to the Office Insider Slow ring lets you use the Touch Bar with the software suite.

The Touch Bar will gain functionality throughout the productivity suite, with options appearing in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word. For example, Excel users will gain intelligent prompts when creating a formula inside of a cell, with buttons for recently used functions.

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While composing a new message in Outlook, the Touch Bar will show a list of recent documents that you can attach. If you're not editing a message in the email client, you'll see a Today view that displays your appointments.

In Word, you'll have options to remove the ribbon for a less-cluttered screen as well as formatting options such as bold, highlighting and italics.

PowerPoint users will see a preview of all of their slides in the Touch Bar, though that's the most redundant feature, as the left-side rail already provides it.

We've been waiting for this functionality since October when Apple announced Office's support for the Touch Bar at the event where it unveiled the notebooks.

If you're wary of trying beta software, the fact that this is in the Slow (rather than Fast) ring, gives us reason to suspect all Office users will get this functionality sooner rather than later.