Four months after preview, Microsoft adds Touch Bar support to latest Office betas

After teasing Touch Bar support for the omnipresent Office in October, Microsoft has added preliminary support for the MacBook Pro feature in its most recent build for the "slow ring" of its beta testers.

First spotted by The Verge, the addition has been a long time in coming. Support for the Touch Bar was teased just hours after the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar debuted.

In Powerpoint, the company has implemented graphic rotation tools, as well as a graphical map of all the slide layers. Microsoft Excel has added an auto-fill formula bar, pulling up the most recently used functions in the Touch Bar when a cell is selected. Excel's bar also now includes formatting options, like cell colors, and borders.

The touch bar on Outlook now provides quick access to the user's most commonly used commands. While composing a mail, the Touch Bar displays a list of recent documents for inclusion in an email, with communication facilitation through Skype possible through a single touch.

Microsoft Word's implementation is "Word Focus" mode, where the formatting ribbon for an open document are taken off the screen and put on the Touch Bar.

Initial AppleInsider testing of the features has resulted in a few application crashes above and beyond the normally rare instabilities experienced by most Mac users of the suite. The Touch Bar-related crashing is expected, however, given the beta nature of the release.

It it not yet known when the Touch Bar support will exit beta.

Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions begin at $69.99 per year for a one-user personal license, or $5 per month per user for businesses.

11 Comments

thedba 790 comments · 12 Years

About 7 years ago

Awesome. Now the only thing I desire is a touchbar magic keyboard hopefully coming early this year.

MplsP 4025 comments · 8 Years

It's good that other companies are supporting the touch bar, but I'm a bit surprised that Microsoft is. Either way, I hope they do a better job than their ribbon interface (yes, I'm setting the bar low!)

macxpress 5910 comments · 16 Years

I really hope Apple releases a USB (and Bluetooth) keyboard with the touchbar (and TouchID). I'm not sure how they'd make sure TouchID is secure, but I'm sure they could figure it out. And they better not be stupid and say you need the latest Mac to use it either. That would just be Apple being Apple at its best right there. I can see you have to be using macOS Sierra, but anything that runs macOS Sierra should support it.

it would also be nice if they'd redesign the entire keyboard. No more friggin white keys! It doesn't match their current designs. How hard would it be to make a nice LED backlit keyboard with black keys?

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

MplsP said:

It's good that other companies are supporting the touch bar, but I'm a bit surprised that Microsoft is. Either way, I hope they do a better job than their ribbon interface (yes, I'm setting the bar low!)

Under new leadership Microsoft is not the anti-competitive beast it used to be. Microsoft makes a fuckload of money off of Mac and iOS users so why not support them.

StrangeDays 12962 comments · 8 Years

macxpress said:

I really hope Apple releases a USB (and Bluetooth) keyboard with the touchbar (and TouchID). I'm not sure how they'd make sure TouchID is secure, but I'm sure they could figure it out. And they better not be stupid and say you need the latest Mac to use it either. That would just be Apple being Apple at its best right there. I can see you have to be using macOS Sierra, but anything that runs macOS Sierra should support it.

That isn't necessarily true. I'm running the latest macOS on an older imac, but it doesn't have the needed BT hardware to do things like unlock with apple watch, hand off, etc.. Hardware requirements exist for a reason, and it's not because they're twirling their wax mustaches while scheming to ruin their customers' day.