If you use Office 2013 for Windows, you’ll be right at home. Remarkably, if you currently use Office 2011, most of the interface will feel comfortable. Office 2016 for Mac unabashedly embraces the traditional keyboard-and-mouse/trackpad paradigm and doesn’t make any awkward trade-offs for touch-driven operation, as we saw in Office 2013 for Windows. If you’re coming from Office for iPad, Android, or Windows 10, the Mac interface is completely different. Office 2016 for Mac takes full advantage of the Retina screen. I’ve never seen Office look so good on any platform (see Figure 1). If you have a Retina screen, wow - the interface adjusts itself automatically, and the high resolution comes shining through everywhere, thanks to Microsoft switching over (almost) completely to Apple’s Cocoa APIs. If you’re an Office for Mac 2011 user, you’ll be struck immediately by the updated interface. As Microsoft reiterated in November: “Office 365 commercial and consumer subscribers will get the next version at no additional cost.” Across-the-board changes You’ll need 5.6GB of disk space and up to 10 minutes for installation, depending on the speed of your Mac.Īs to be expected, we have no idea how much Microsoft will charge for the stand-alone version by the time it ships later this year. In this beta incarnation, Word 2016 alone is bigger than the entire Office for Mac 2011 suite. (Outlook 2016 has been updated precious little in the past year and not at all since January it’s still an embarrassment.) If you already have Office 2011 installed, the new Office 2016 will run side by side on the same Mac with no interference.

This preview edition includes new beta versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as the previously released beta versions of OneNote and Outlook 2016 for Mac. Naturally, we’ll have to wait for the final, shipping products to draw detailed conclusions. Surprisingly, the feature set of Office 2016 for Mac is nearly on par with that of the Windows version, with the gaps lying mainly in Excel and PowerPoint. Last week, Microsoft made a preview edition of Office 2016 for Mac available to the masses, runnable on any OS X Yosemite computer. If you’ve been struggling with Office for Mac 2011 and suffering from Windows envy, your time has finally come. For many years, Office for Mac has played second fiddle to its Windows cousin.

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