14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft continues the work on refining Microsoft Office on all platforms, and unsurprisingly, macOS devices are playing an important role in this strategy.
The Office Insider program available on the Mac allows Microsoft to test new features before the public release, thus making sure that everything is running as expected and reducing the likelihood of bugs when a certain release is ready to go live for production devices.
Microsoft has recently published a new Office for Mac preview build, and this time the focus has been entirely on Outlook, which gets both new features and fixes under the hood.
One of the new features concerns Zoom, as Outlook will now warn users if they have a Zoom plug-in install. The app will instead recommend the supported Zoom add-in, so overall, Outlook will help users get a more refined experience with Zoom through the official add-in.
In addition, S/MIME is once again enabled in the latest Insider Fast build, Microsoft explains.
Plenty of fixes
Microsoft has also resolved lots of issues in the latest release, and the official changelog indicates that it finally addressed an error blocking users from adding Google accounts to Outlook, as the process failed with an “Unsupported account error.” Needless to say, Gmail is fully supported on Outlook, so things are supposed to work correctly now after the update.
In addition, Microsoft says it has fixed an issue causing Outlook to ignore the language set in system preferences, which means that the app will now use the same language as macOS.
There are also various UI refinements for macOS Big Sur for Outlook users.
Keep in mind this is a preview release, and if the testing goes well, then all the improvements detailed above should go live on production devices in the next few weeks.