CAN'T PIN FOLDERS ANYMORE IN EXCEL/WORD 2016

it's back as of November fast ring update

Yep, it's back since version 1611 (Build 7571.2072). In the SAVE AS window there's a new "Recent" item.

It took me a while to noticed that, since it was always going to "This place" item. If you prefer to select a recent folder by default like me, deselect the option "Save to Computer by default" (found at Options > Save).

it's back as of November fast ring update

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, there is very little enforced consistency, few "standards", in the design of applications in the Office "Suite". You have pointed out one of the recently introduced inconsistencies.

My favorite is the handling of the number of colors supported by various features.  For a while, there where at least 3 different upper limits on the numbers of colors supported by various features.  At least in 2016 they have reduced that to 2 standards, the "original 16" colors which are the limit for the "Highlight" feature, and 16.7 million colors in 24 bit color support in the "Custom" tab.  You can also still see support for the intermediate 128 colors in the Hexagon color picker in the "Standard" color tab.

As said, the weird thing is that Word 2016 folders are showing up in Save As,

but not in Excel.

I have used Excel quite a lot, but the folders shown there, remain just 'Documents' and 'Desktop'

No folders are displayed, contrary to Word 2016.

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Mike:

Yes, there area inconsistencies between Word and Excel. Long ago, MS made a conscious decision to allow the separate programs in the Office "suite" to "do their own thing" within very broad guidelines. The result is that the same feature can have different names and icons in the different applications.  Another sign of this is the recent change in Excel. In Office 2016 some genius (with the IQ of a pet rock, IMHO. Or maybe it was a committee2

) decided to change, to "improve" The File OPEN/Recent and File SAVE/SAVE AS dialogs, removing the option to pin folders and changing the sort order to date. While this makes sense for a MRU, Most Recently Used list, many of us were happier with the alphabetical sort order for longer term organization of pinned files and folders.   And just recently, ONLY the Excel developers responded to a UserVoice change request to return to alpha sort order. So now in Word 2016 you still see "recent" files in date order, while for Office Insiders in Excel they are back to Alpha order (the fix has not yet been released to the general public). 

Confusion reigns.