It’s fair to say that Microsoft Office is no longer the beast it was. It used to be that if there were a new version of Office, you bought it. Now we’re in 2015 and enough people still use an old version of Word that you’re wise sending documents around in that older format, the .doc one.

But the new format, .docx, was introduced in 2007. It would once have been unimaginable that people skipped eight years of updates but now it’s normal.

So any new version of Office that comes along had better pack some compelling reasons to upgrade. I have no idea whether the next edition has anything that good – but I’m about to find out and you can too.

For Microsoft has today released a free preview of Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac. You can get it here. It’s a fairly big download that is currently struggling on my slow internet connection but yours is faster, off you go.

Microsoft would hope you do. It would also hope that you love it so much that when the preview is over and the real product is released that you’ll pony up and buy it. If you do that, it will be because this is really good and really useful – so let’s hope so too.

This is what I like. Sod the fantasy vision of the future, I like it when a company puts its money where its mouth is and lets us actually use something. I like it even better when they do an Apple and reveal something flashy and end with the line “available today”.