Microsoft Office 2016

Microsoft releases Office 2016 for Mac, but just for Office 365

A standalone version will be released in September, Microsoft said.

After years of treating the Mac as an also-ran, Microsoft has changed its tune: Microsoft formally released Office 2016 for the Mac on Thursday morning, even before it released it for Windows. The only catch? If you’re not already an Office 365 subscriber, you’ll be forced to wait until September.

Bringing Office up to date

The new Office suite also addresses general shortcomings with the suite that Microsoft has struggled with, regardless of platform. A good example is real-time collaboration, where users can edit a document simultaneously, rather than send it back and forth for updates and other edits. Google has offered this with its online Google Apps suite, but it’s a feature that Office has lacked until recently.

Microsoft highlighted a few of the improvements that it provided for each specific Office application: in PowerPoint, for example, the new improved Presenter View shows you your current slide, the next slide, your notes, and a timer, while your audience sees only the presentation itself. Outlook contains a conversation view and threading (nothing really new where email is concerned, of course), and Excel will do a better job of recommending specific charts to showcase your data to best effect. New PivotTable Slicers also help you filter large volumes of data, Microsoft said.

The newest addition to the Office for Mac suite is OneNote, Microsoft’s note-taking app for Windows and mobile platforms, although OneNote did launch as a standalone Mac app in 2014, and it’s on iOS too. You can save your notes in notebooks that reside in the cloud. Notes can include a mixed bag of text, Web pages, and graphics, especially handy for, say, college lectures that combine a variety of media.

For those of you who have tried out the Office Preview, what’s your take? Is iWork superior to the new Office, or is this just what you’ve been waiting for? We’ll have our own formal review soon.

Stay tuned for more updates...