How to reduce the size of quick access toolbar icons? (Office 2016)

Patrick,

The new interface is an nice improvement to to the QAT.  Icon space is now down to twice as wide, vs.  3 times as wide before.  For instance, in Word 2010, I have 60 icons in 3/4 of the full screen.  In Word 2016, only 30 icons now.  Before it was 20.  So from one perspective (bad) I got a 50% increase.  However, compared to Word 2010, I am only up to 50% of the icons, from 33%.   Remember, us desktop users have mice, not fingers.  But at least it is a start.  Many thanks for that. And thankfully, it didnt overwrite my Word 2010 as default program.  

BTW, Given the universal cries of dismay with Windows 8, may I suggest MS do a better job on focus groups?  Virtually every review and comment on the GUI I saw was negative.  But its internal workings are indeed far superior, according to my IT guy, so I sucked it up and used Start 8 interface.   Maybe you should ask us to review these GUI changes?  Guarantee you we could come up with a far better interface.  

Which gets us to Cleartype.  Google is rife with threads castigating its loss.  I understand that the reason for this is that 2013 was intended for tablets, which can be turned to portrait mode.  As you know, clear type works by selectively turning off one the three lateral subpixels for every pixel, which only works horizontally. So the infinite masters of GUIdom decided that we all should lose out on that option, even though the vast majority of desktop displays are landscape.  There really should have been two versions, a tablet one, and a desktop one.  I cannot display the differences between the two, because screen dumps are not saved with cleartype.  Just open the same document in Word 2010 and 2106 in half windows, and you will see the difference.  There is no comparison.  

At any rate, nice to talk to a human behind the MS fortress.

The linked TechNet page links to a security bulletin with information for the 29 security updates but I didn't find any information on the 36 non-security updates.  Is it possible to get this information so that I can select which updates to apply?

The release team just announced availability of the January update:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/ (worth bookmarking)

Mtn - thanks for the kind words; the folks who worked on the Windows 8 "Modern" UX were making a lot of change (so not just one moonshot but several) and as you look around some of our competitor's experiences you'll see many of the UX design features first pioneered in Windows 8.

There were some compromises that bit pretty hard into the experience, but the team was working in a very customer-centric way - and they lead on running the first really early beta program for Windows so there was lots of feedback and much of it was incorporated. They've got even better since and our preview customers now get (slightly fewer) the same builds we get internally.

Interesting question on cleartype/text rendering - how about starting a new thread and showing me what you mean (and post back to this thread so I'll know to look for your example)

Rohn - thanks!

Please let us know if the new bits have resolved the issue...

...pc

Thanks for the update.

Knowing that a change request has been acted on and now is in the chute for general distribution "soon" (in the next month or so) really helps reduce user frustration.

There was a similar update about the 2016 Style Pane issue, it is in testing and supposed to be released "soon".

I wish MS would do this more frequently.