Microsoft Office 16.93 — Mac version

Turning a bundle of notes into a document

OneNote’s digital notebook is where I keep half-finished thoughts, bits of research and scrappy lists. Before I start a proper letter in Word, I open OneNote, drag the relevant text clippings out of the chaos and drop them straight into a blank document.

Pulling the numbers from Excel

Word handles the words, but the household budget lives in Excel. I select the quarterly totals, copy the cells, and paste them into the letter as a linked table. Any tweaks to the spreadsheet later on ripple through automatically.

Sending it off with Outlook

With the letter finished and the figures in place, I switch to Outlook. I attach the file, pull the recipient’s address from the unified contacts list, and send it on its way—calendar reminder added so the follow-up doesn’t slip my mind.

Turn off the animated cursor before anything else

Office on a Mac arrives with a lot switched on by default. Spend half an hour dialling things back and it feels less like a rented suit.

Turn off the animated cursor in Word first. Head to Word → Preferences → View and untick “Use animated cursor”. The blinking insertion point stops dancing and you can actually see where you are. While you are in there, switch the ribbon to “Collapse ribbons automatically” under General—it gives you back the top inch of screen on a MacBook.

Next, kill the default cloud save path. Word, Excel and PowerPoint all want to save to OneDrive by default. If you work locally most of the time, go to File → Options → Save (the wording varies per app, but the idea is the same) and set “Save to Computer by default”. You can still save to OneDrive when you want to; it just stops being the assumption.

In Outlook, switch off the “New Outlook” toggle if it has appeared. The new interface is still a work in progress and some older Exchange accounts refuse to play nicely with it. You will find the toggle in the top-right corner. Flick it off, restart, and Outlook settles back into the version that handles rules and local folders properly.

Stop Word from auto-creating numbered lists when you type "1.

A few defaults in each app are worth hunting down early. None of these are hidden away in plist files—they are all in the standard preferences panes.

• Word: Under AutoCorrect, kill the automatic numbered list creation. Typing “1.” and a space should not start a fight with the indent engine. Same tab: untick “Capitalize first letter of sentences” if you write code snippets or technical notes in the same document.
• Excel: Turn off AutoComplete for cell values under Edit. Useful in small sheets, maddening in large ones where similar-looking entries keep popping up unbidden.
• PowerPoint: Switch the default save format from PPTX to PowerPoint 97–2004 Presentation (.ppt) if you regularly share files with people on older kit. You lose a handful of modern effects, but nobody emails you back saying the file won’t open.
• Outlook: In Reading preferences, set “Mark as read” to “Only when opened in a separate window”. The default—mark read the instant you click—wrecks any hope of using the message list as a to-do stack.

File sharing with other people decides whether Office earns its disc space

If you already have Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the machine, you might wonder whether Office earns its disc space. The answer depends on who you share files with.

Apple iWork is lighter on resources, opens in a snap and handles PDF export beautifully. But the moment a colleague sends you a .docx with tracked changes from a Windows machine, Pages buckles. Fonts shift, comments misalign and section breaks go wandering. Office reads those files exactly as the sender laid them out—no translation layer, no surprises.

LibreOffice is the community-maintained heavyweight. It opens almost anything, including ancient WordPerfect files that nothing else will touch. The trade-off is interface polish. Toolbars feel crowded, the macOS look is skin-deep, and font rendering looks slightly fuzzy on Retina screens. For occasional document rescue work, it is invaluable. For eight hours a day of writing and number-crunching, Office is easier on the eyes and the wrists.

Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides) lives in the browser. No installation, no local storage worries, and collaborative editing works without friction. Offline access is a bolt-on that sometimes forgets it exists. For solo work with complex layouts or pivot tables, the browser apps feel laggy where Office responds instantly. If your internet connection is patchy, Office simply carries on working; a browser tab stares at a spinner.

Where Office really pulls ahead is the way the apps talk to each other. A chart pasted from Excel into Word stays linked. A PowerPoint slide deck pulls outline text straight from a Word document heading structure. None of the three alternatives match that depth of integration across the suite—though Google Workspace comes closest if you live entirely online.

How Office fits with other apps and macOS

Office does not live in a bubble. A few connections are worth setting up early, because they save clicks every single day.

Finder Quick Actions: Select a Word document in Finder, tap the spacebar for Quick Look, and you get a readable preview without opening the app. Right-click and choose “Create PDF” from the Quick Actions menu, and Office handles the conversion in the background. No extra tools needed.

Apple Mail and Outlook: You do not have to pick sides. I keep Outlook for the work account—where calendar sharing and delegated mailboxes matter—and let Apple Mail handle personal email. Both sit in the Dock quite happily. Drag a file from a Finder window onto the Outlook icon in the Dock and it attaches to a new message, just as it does with Mail.

Shortcuts and Automator: Office apps speak basic AppleScript and respond to Shortcuts actions. A one-click Shortcut that opens Excel, runs a saved macro and exports a PDF to a specific folder is entirely doable. It is not as slick as Shortcuts integration on iPadOS, but it works for batch jobs.

Spotlight and file search: Office documents index into Spotlight automatically. Searching for a phrase buried inside a .docx or .xlsx file from the menu bar works without any extra configuration. If Spotlight stops indexing Office files—rare, but it happens—a quick re-index with mdutil in Terminal usually sorts it.

OneDrive and local storage: OneDrive plays the long game of syncing your Documents folder if you let it. That means every Word file you save ends up accessible from a browser or a Windows machine without extra steps. If you prefer keeping local files truly local, the default save location change mentioned earlier keeps the sync engine out of your way until you choose to involve it.

• macOS 13 or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac (64-bit)