Microsoft Office For Mac

Mac users of Office who have felt left out in the cold by Microsoft (because the last version, Office 2011 for Mac, was released in October 2010) now have reason to be pleased: The final version of Office 2016 for Mac brings the suite out of the dark ages and into the modern world.

Hints of what the new Office would offer have been out for quite a while, notably the preview of Outlook, introduced in October 2014. But Mac owners had to wait until early July for the final release of the full suite, including the core applications Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Office 2016 for Mac is definitely more powerful than Office for iPad, as you would hope, and it has far more features than the Windows RT version of Office, Office Online or the new Windows 10. Microsoft Office 2016 for the Mac is the kind of upgrade I hope for but rarely get. It took five years from Office 2011's release to get this latest Mac office suite, but it was well worth the wait.

It was well worth the wait. Office 2016 for Mac sports a far better interface than Office 2011, integrates well with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and dramatically improves Outlook.

(Note: Mac for Office 2016 requires Yosemite OS X or better. It’s currently only available as part of a subscription to Office 365, which allows you to install Office on multiple devices. It will sell as a standalone Mac product later this month.)

Spanking new interface

The moment you run any Office application, you know you've left the aging Office 2011 behind. It's less cluttered, cleaner and sleeker-looking, more logically organized, more colorful and simpler to use. That's largely in part because the Ribbon has been redone, and now looks and works as it does in the Windows version of Office.

The Ribbon is far more prominent and now sits close to the top of the screen rather than (as before) beneath a long row of icons for doing things such as opening and closing files, printing and so on. The usual Mac menu that sits atop Mac applications is hidden as well, although you can reveal it by moving your cursor to the top of the screen. It's a clever way to bridge the worlds of Office and Mac OS X.

Not everyone is a Ribbon fan, though, and those who wish it were gone, or just want to give themselves a little more screen real estate, can hide it by clicking a small up arrow at the Ribbon's far right. The Ribbon goes away and the arrow turns to face downwards. Click the arrow to make the Ribbon come back.

Not only has the Ribbon been moved but it's been reorganized, which is all to the good. For example, Word's confusing Document Elements tab is gone; most of what was there can now be found in the more logically-named Insert tab. So now, you use the Insert tab when you want to insert anything, whether it be art, a table, header, link and so on. In Office 2011 you had to go on a treasure hunt through many different tabs to find all that. You'll find similar reorganizations throughout all of Office.

For me, this reorganized Ribbon has made Office more usable and far more pleasurable to use than the previous version. Also, I use the Windows version of Office, and because the Mac version now closely mirrors it, I found switching between Office on Windows and Office on the Mac to be largely seamless.

Standardized look and feel

In Office 2016, Microsoft is bringing a common look and feel to the suite across all platforms, which is why this Mac version looks much like the recently released Windows-based Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview. However, there are still some differences between the Mac version and the Windows Office preview. As with the Windows 2016 preview, on the Mac the applications are color-coded: Blue for Word, green for Excel and red for PowerPoint.

Also missing in the Mac version is one of the more useful features of the Windows version: A box on the far right of the ribbon with the text, 'Tell me what you want to do.' Type in a task, and you get walked through doing it via options and menus. I found that exceptionally useful, and hope that Microsoft eventually introduces it in the final, shipping version of Office 2016 for the Mac.

Another difference: The Ribbon doesn't have the File tab. In the Windows version of Office, when you click the File tab, you're sent to what Microsoft calls Backstage, for doing things such as opening a file, viewing cloud-based services associated with your accounts and so on. That's missing in the Mac version.

You can do some of what Backstage offers in the Mac version -- for example, you can open files by either clicking on a folder icon just above the Ribbon on the left-hand side of the screen or by pressing the Command-O keyboard combination. But that still won't offer other Backstage capabilities, such as controlling what changes people can make to a document. In the Mac version, you do that in the Review tab.

And I couldn't locate two other features of Backstage anywhere in the Mac version of Office: Checking a document to see whether it contains hidden personal information and managing previous versions of a file. It may be that they're hidden so deeply I couldn't find them. But it's a shortcoming of the Mac version of Office, even if it's only a minor one.

Integration with OneDrive

Microsoft has been integrating its cloud-based service OneDrive into both Windows and Office, and so, as you would expect, access to OneDrive is built right into Office 16 for the Mac. You have a choice of opening or saving files either to the cloud-based OneDrive or on your Mac's hard disk.

Reviews Microsoft Office For Mac 2016 2017 2018

It took me a little while to get used to the somewhat confusing OneDrive interface. When you choose File / Open or press Command-O, you see a screen that is clearly designed to be like every other Office screen, with the same colors, size of icons and so on. You then have the choice of opening a file on OneDrive or on your local Mac.

If you choose to open a OneDrive file, you get the same Office-like interface. However, if you choose a Mac-based file, you’re switched to the Mac’s Finder interface and have to use it navigate to files stored on your local version of OneDrive.

Using two different interfaces to open files is jarring at first and takes getting used to. However, after a few times I got used to dealing with it. You likely will as well.

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Word 2016

As with the other Office applications, the main thing that's new about Word is the interface. But there are other changes as well.

There is now a somewhat awkward collaboration feature that lets two people work simultaneously in the same document. In theory it sounds nice; in practice, I wasn't impressed. You don't see the changes your collaborator makes until she saves the document, and she won't see your changes until you save it. That's not exactly real-time collaboration. Nice try, but I won't be using the feature any time soon -- Google Docs is far superior in this area, because it uses true real-time collaboration.

On the plus side, there's a new Styles pane that lets you apply pre-set styles to text and paragraphs. It's easy to overlook, because it's available only on the Home tab. To use it, go to the Home tab and click the Styles Pane icon on the upper right of the screen -- and the pane appears. Click the icon again to make it go away.

Word 2016 also adds another useful new pane, the Navigation pane, which lets you navigate through a document via search results, headings and page thumbnails. You can also navigate by the kinds of changes you've made to the document, such as comments and formatting.

Excel 2016

One of the most welcome additions to Excel is that it now r

Reviews Microsoft Office For Mac 2016 2017 2018