Introduction, interface and collaboration
Microsoft Office may have started life on the Mac before it ever came to Windows, but for many Mac users it feels like that was the last time we ever had anything 'Officey' before our Windows-using brethren.
This release of Office, then, is mostly about closing the gap with Office 2013 for Windows, in terms not only of feature parity and document compatibility but also by harmonising the interface across Mac, Windows and mobile – a boon to productivity if you regularly work across different platforms.
It mostly, if not entirely, succeeds in this, and moreover it looks and feels like a contemporary Mac citizen – although Office 2011 (the previous Mac version) supported Retina displays, it had started to look very old fashioned as the OS X aesthetic moved on.
Modern Mac
However, while Microsoft has finally embraced some modern Mac developments – multi-touch gestures for zooming and panning, native full-screen – there are more which it hasn't bothered with.
Predictably, for example, there's no iCloud Drive integration. This isn't a show-stopper since Microsoft's own OneDrive cloud storage provides some if not all of the benefits of iCloud Drive – notably, files don't appear in the Finder as usual unless you install the OneDrive app, and the open/save dialog is a bit inelegant, which could be irritating depending on your workflows. OS X's versioning – specifically – isn't supported either; there is versioning available through OneDrive, but it's clunkier.
And perhaps most egregiously, despite close parity between the iOS apps and new Mac Office apps – and despite OneDrive already being baked into both to handle the back-end – there's no support for Handoff between desktop and mobile. That's hardly calamitous, and it may be coming in an update, but it's frustrating to see Microsoft still dragging its heels over implementing exciting new capabilities of the Apple world.
Aesthetic appeal
Overall, Office 2016 still feels a little siloed from the broader Mac world – using its own dictionaries rather than OS X's, say – an approach which is neither empirically good or bad, but the appeal of which depends on whether you're invested more in the Mac or Office ecosystems.
Even if nothing else, though, Office 2016 looks fantastic – simultaneously familiar to users on Windows but also thoroughly Mac in terms of the visuals – and the optional coloured title bars help orientate you in the suite's apps. The redesigned Ribbon menu groups tasks logically and in the same way as the Windows version, and though there is still sometimes a confusing proliferation of ways to achieve the same things, most would agree it's a good solution to making Office's complexity more palatable and generally usable.
Windows compatibility and collaboration
Windows compatibility for documents has been significantly improved, with more Excel functions and PowerPoint transitions making it to the Mac version from Windows, but be warned that, bafflingly, there are still disparities. Likewise, with questionable benefit, some Windows-style shortcuts – Ctrl-S as well as Cmd-S, say – work in Office for Mac now, but some don't.
Microsoft touts its new Task Pane, but honestly it's done little more than dock the floating Toolbox from earlier versions – fine, but not worth so much hype.
Collaboration and co-authoring tools are welcome, though they're sub-par compared to the office suites from Google and even Apple – when working together on a Word document, say, both parties have to save their changes before they appear on the other's screen. It's not live, as with its competitors, though the new threaded comments feature is great. It's not consistent, either – OneNote collaborative changes are live, and although you can share Excel documents, only one person can work on the file at once.
Note, finally, that at the moment you can only get Office for the Mac as part of Microsoft's Office 365 subscription package. Redmond isn't saying why, but one interpretation is that it's keen to sign as many people up to Office 365 as it can. A standalone, subscription-free version will be available in September.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote
Okay, so let's look at the separate Office applications and what changes have been made to them in detail.
Word
Word hasn't received many specific improvements other than the general ones described on the previous page, and indeed the useful audio-recording, time-stamping notebook view in Office 2011 has actually gone. (It's okay; that feature is still available, just in OneNote now.)
One addition we will note – as well as a commendable reorganisation of relevant commands under the new Design tab – is Smart Lookup, which pops up not just dictionary and thesaurus entries for selected words in the Task Pane, but also Bing-powered internet searches too. Again, this is not dramatically different to 2011's feature, but just bolted into a pane rather than a floating window.
Excel
Sensibly, given that most regular users will be more than ably served by Numbers on a Mac, Microsoft has focused on adding high-level, pro features to Excel 2016. As well as the new PivotTable Slicers – to help sift through vast swathes of data – there's an optional Analysis Toolpak add-on to aid complex engineering and statistical analysis.
The equations editor and formula builder are easier to use – logical grouping makes it easier for pros to find what they want than with Numbers, as well – and improved autocomplete plus the new feature that recommends the best charts and PivotTables for whatever you're doing make Excel feel like a significant upgrade.
Note, however, that although compatibility with functions created in Office 2013 on Windows has been boosted, not all are supported, which means that despite Microsoft's efforts to appeal to the power user with this update, there is still friction in mixed platform environments. Most users will likely never do anything sufficiently advanced to run into this problem, but it's infuriating that differences exist at all today.
PowerPoint
As well as modernising the interface, the revamped PowerPoint also includes new presentation templates which do look fresher and less comically corporate. What's more, each of the 23 designs all also have variants, which combined with the colour themes actually means there's a commendable, harmonious range of options.
Most welcome are the improvements to Presenter View, which shows you notes, next slide, and so on, on your laptop screen while a connected projector just shows the presentation – and notably the button that lets you quickly swap displays.
There's a lot of power in PowerPoint – with myriad options for formatting and editing pictures, even if we miss Keynote's handy Instant Alpha tool – and it's no longer the clunky, media-unfriendly dog it used to be. There are reasons to use it over Keynote even if corporate best practice (where the new threaded comments are hugely useful) doesn't mandate it – such as the terrifically handy 3D view of all slide elements which makes it easy to reorder things.
But if you're a regular user, Keynote's speed, polish and robustness, not to mention the fact that it lets you export presentations to movies, a 2011 feature now missing in 2016, makes it the stronger choice for many.
Outlook
For the majority of Mac users, Mail, Contacts and Calendar are the natural choices – not least because in this increasingly ecosystem-dominated world, they are tightly integrated into iOS and watchOS – and so while Outlook on the Mac isn't a bad application by any measure, for home and small office users it's the least necessary app in the suite.
There are some very welcome improvements: An option to propose a new time when declining a meeting; side-by-side calendars; weather forecasts in the calendar; syncing of categories; smarter email threading (rather than just thinking all emails with the same subject line are related); and our favourite, the option of defining different signatures for new messages as for replies. However, despite all this most non-corporate Mac users will struggle to think of compelling enough reasons to switch.
While we love the longstanding feature which lets you create an event based off and linked to an email, there's no link with OneNote (as on Windows), and inexplicably you have no access to OneDrive from the attach menu when composing an email. Since OneDrive, unlike iCloud Drive, doesn't by default cache files to a user-exposed directory on the hard disk, this means you can't attach files stored in OneDrive to an existing email unless you install the OneDrive app.
OneNote
This is a new member of the Office suite on the Mac, though it's existed on iOS and standalone for the Mac on the App Store before now, and it's a genuinely great freeform note-taking tool. It's where you'll find the old Word feature of recording audio as you type notes – with timestamps, so you can click next to a note and hear the audio from when you wrote it – and notes support a broad range of media types.
If you're already a heavy Evernote user, OneNote has little to offer you, and the beefed-up Notes app coming in OS X 10.11 El Capitan will suffice for many, but if you're already deep into the Office way of doing things or don't currently use a notebook app, OneNote is excellent. Just note that if that's all you want, you don't need the full Office suite – you can get it free for Mac and iOS.
Verdict
On Windows, if you want a competent office suite, you buy Microsoft Office; you just do. (As with the Mac, some very good web and open source alternatives exist, but unless you take an ideological position or are on a very tight budget, Microsoft Office is worth the investment for your sanity alone.) On the Mac, though, things are very different, thanks largely to the ubiquity and strength of Apple's iWork suite.
But while it's great to see a modern, improvement-packed version of Office for the Mac, it's sometimes wearisome that Microsoft's suite which started life on this platform still doesn't feel entirely native to it. The long period since the last version has allowed competitors to build compelling alternatives, and has also let many consumers discover them.
We liked
Office 2016 for Mac feels modern again, and this shouldn't be underestimated; it's once again pleasant to use Office apps on a modern Mac system.
Cross-platform compatibility and feature parity – which means iOS and Android now, as well as Windows – is improved, though still, maddeningly enough, imperfect.
Although in general specific apps have received comparatively minor feature upgrades, the addition of strong, pro-level features to Excel will mean anyone who wants to do some advanced data analysis, but who equally doesn't want to use a hardware or virtualised PC, now probably can.
We disliked
Though some of our complaints about Office are directed at the suite itself – the extent to which it doesn't integrate more broadly with the Mac ecosystem, its ignorance of exciting Apple technologies such as Handoff, and collaboration tools which are weak next to those from Google and even Apple – the broader point is that many will find it hard to care.
Not only is the iWork suite available and very good, many Mac users will have it already or can get it for free. That said, if your life regularly involves swapping office documents with the outside world, the hassle of round-tripping with import/export – not to mention the potential for translation errors – often means that relying on iWork is a bad idea, and there may be Office-specific features you need. Excel in particular is far more capable for hardcore spreadsheeting – even if Numbers represents what most people actually do with spreadsheets.
Final verdict
Taken in the abstract, this is a superb office suite, and we welcome what's happened on and under the surface – even if some of the areas for further improvement are glaringly obvious. But on the Mac, where iWork is effectively free for many, and in a world where Google's web apps do collaborative working better, it's harder than ever to justify.
Enterprise and education users big and small will be grateful for Microsoft's updated suite since it will help managed systems work more smoothly in mixed platform environments, but consumers should try it first to see if it brings any tangible benefits – and to ensure it hasn't ditched features they rely on.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1Lw5eNL
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