docx file and you don’t have Microsoft Word for Mac installed, what do you do? You can, of course, open the file with Quick Look or Preview, but the styling might be off and you wouldn’t be able to edit it. Usability in excel means announcement of column and header rows, which I've never gotten to work and usability in PowerPoint means ability to edit slides effectively.Can I Download Microsoft Word For Free On Mac? Just being able to type a short document is not enough, though: usable means usable in a professional context, which means very long documents with heading styles, comments, track changes, etc. If others aren't encountering the above-listed issues using Word for Mac, then perhaps it's my mid-2013 MacBook Air to blame, so let me know if that's the case.

And, so long as a Windows machine is necessary, everything else that works well/better under Mac OS works pretty much just as well on IOS with an external keyboard. Without access to Word on Mac, a Windows machine remains necessary for my work life, where things like Ulysses and Pages aren't adequate substitutes, though I use Ulysses for my personal and Web-oriented writing. 'Voiceover follows keyboard focus' is selected in my settings, but doesn't appear to work as expected in Word. Pressing shift+f5 to go back to where I was previously editing works and moves the voiceover focus. I didn't stick around to find out.ĥ) focus is still liable to jump back to the beginning if I edit a document without interacting with the text area, even though editing works just fine without interacting, so long as I don't switch to using a rotor action like moving by sentence. I am going to assume that other types of revisions like misspellings or track changes are likewise not reported. I have to activate the window chooser to find the dialog.ģ) Heading styles are navigable using the rotor, but heading styles are not reported in the text area.Ĥ) the presence of comments are not reported in the text area. Others have reported the same thing on here.Ģ) When opening the 'customize keyboard' dialog, the focus doesn't move to the Window.

Navigating to the next page hangs for more than a second, and other tasks can just hang the machine indefinitely. Here's what I ran into using Word:ġ) Long documents still completely choke Voiceover.

The M1 hoopla prompted me to dig out my ancient MBA, update to the latest Catalina version and update Microsoft 365 to give it another spin.

Microsoft 365 for high sierra