2016

Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac Preview

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Quick version: it looks good, mostly – no, wait, here’s how I summed it up for MacNN:

Testing this new beta is, actually, slightly weird: the Mac versions of Word and Excel now look like the iPad versions. That’s mostly true when you first start them up and they present a dialog box with New and Open options, plus templates. Choose one and go into it to edit the document, and the resemblance fades a little.

One thing that made the iOS version of Office a pleasure to use was that it was pared back, that some of Microsoft Office’s more esoteric features were removed. That even makes the Ribbon toolbar more useful, and this new Mac version also tries to balance features with a more minimalist look. We’ll have to see what it’s like after weeks and months of intense use, but at first blush it feels better than it was.

There are points where items seem a bit oversized: certain icons in the Ribbon feel excessive, and intro text as you set up the applications feels loud. That’s not a bad summary of the entire experience of using Microsoft Office 2016; it mostly looks better, Word feels good to write in, Excel feels powerful.

Hands On: Microsoft Office 2016 Preview (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (6 March 2015)

If you’ve got a Mac and some time to kill, go get the Office 2016 preview here. It’s entirely free while it’s in beta and the best way to find out about anything is to use it. Do remember that it’s a beta, though: it’s not complete and it is always possible that you’ll lose work. So don’t do anything important in it.

Also, you could read the rest of my MacNN piece.

This is better: try Microsoft’s vision of Office for Mac now

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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”.