One of MacBook Pro’s main attraction is its Touch Bar display which can provide you with shortcuts to the tools which are sometimes difficult to find. The display was initially not supported for Microsoft’s very popular MS Office, however, this fact is now history. In an announcement made today, Microsoft has said that support for Touch Bar display present above the keyboard of MacBook Pro laptops is now available for its Office suite of apps.
The declaration is comes shortly after Microsoft’s release of preview Mac versions of its Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications which offered support to MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, earlier this month.
The advantage of having the Touch Bar can well recognized while running Apple’s own apps like Safari and Messages or while using some third party apps like Spotify and Ulysses. However, MS Excel and MS Word are still some of the most popular desktop applications in the world with millions of people spending seven to eight daily hours on them. So, the support for such apps was pretty much necessary.
The Touch Bar now shows some new options in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Microsoft has also added some new features to the Touch Bar for those apps, like the button that allows you to easily rotate an object — such as an image — that you drop into a document. The Touch Bar support will soon be rolling out for Microsoft’s Outlook and Skype for Business applications as well.
Microsoft and Apple constitute almost the entire desktop operating system market, and Microsoft has made made many attempts to ensure that its Office runs perfectly on Apple’s hardware. Doing so ensures that it is able to tap into the huge Mac ecosystem as well as its own. So, ensuring that the popular Office suite apps offered support for the Touch bar was pretty much the logical next step.
