Microsoft's flagship productivity product, Office, has always felt like a second-class citizen on the Mac. That changes today, with the release of a preview version of Office 2016 for Mac, now. In Microsoft Outlook 2016 for Mac or Office for Mac 2011, you receive a 'No Results' message when you try to search for an email message or apply a filter to a folder, and task items are not displayed in the Tasks folder.
Just in case you missed the big news, Office 2016 for Mac (version is 15.11.2) was released to Office 365 subscribers. If you have a subscription for Office 365 software, you can download Office 2016 from account's download software page. The Public Preview will expire on August 9, as will the RTM installation for non-subscribers; the Enterprise volume licensing and retail perpetual licenses will be released within a few weeks. Current version (as of August 13 2015) of Office 2016 for Mac is 15.13.1. My favorite new Outlook features are the ability to view calendars side by side or overlaid, just like on the windows version.
You can also propose new meeting times (if using Office 365 Exchange or the new Outlook.com). Office for Mac looks like Office for Windows, but how similar are they under the hood? Closer than with older versions, but still far apart. Want to request Read receipts? Voting buttons?
Message Recall? Ok, message recall gets a pass since it doesn’t work all that well on Windows either. Mailtips and other informational messages such as mailbox quota? While you can't sync Outlook.com calendar and contacts to Outlook 2016 for Mac right now, after the Outlook.com accounts are moved to Office 365 hosting, you can add the outlook.com account as an Exchange account and everything will sync. There seems to be an issue that many people are having with reminders coming from shared calendars. For example, if Bill accesses Sue's calendar through Outlook 2016, some of Sue's events (including events that Bill is not invited to) may show up in Bill's reminder list.
Some of these reminders cannot be dismissed. It is possible to blow away Bill's profile and start from scratch with a new profile on the Mac/PC, but eventually, some events from Sue's calendar will start showing up and not be dismissible. Interestingly, these typically will be different events than the ones that got stuck in the first profile. There are a bunch of reports of this on the 'net, but no permanent, reliable solution as of this writing.