After over a month of testing with Office Insiders, Microsoft has now updated Office on the Mac with support for macOS Mojave’s Dark Mode.

According to Microsoft, Office for macOS now offers a “modern Office design that’s fully optimized for the Mac, including Retina display and full-screen view,” which refers to two key macOS features. Its customizable ribbon means that “all the power of Office [is] now organized the way you want it.”

The latest Office for Mac release also supports a new Focus Mode—a kind of trendy thing in Mac-based text editors and other creation apps—so that you can concentrate only on what you’re working on. And it features improved accessibility via its improved Reading Mode and auto-generated Alt-Text meta-data for images. It also supports expressive inking, presumably for those Mac users with a pen tablet peripheral.

But the most striking change, of course, isn’t mentioned by Microsoft when you upgrade: Office for Mac now automatically conforms to whichever view mode you use. So those using Dark Mode in macOS Mojave will now see a dark and more natural-looking new user experience.

Apple shipped macOS Mojave in September, adding Dark Mode support and other new features. Microsoft then began publicly testing Dark Mode for Office in October and extended that testing to Outlook in mid-November. With Windows 10 also supporting its own Dark Mode, Microsoft has likewise brought this UI change to other products, like Outlook.com on the web.

As always, you’ll need an Office 365 subscription to see this update and its new features.

Tagged with Office for Mac