Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac

Note: Our Office 2016 for Mac review has been fully updated for November 2016

Office on the Mac went for almost five years without a significant update, making it hard to remember that Word and Excel actually started out on Apple’s computers. Office 2016 for Mac replaced the 2011 version that had grown so long in the tooth, and it was well worth waiting for.

This a real version of Office, with features and tools that will be familiar to Windows users, but in the form of real Mac applications as well. You get the ribbons and task panes of the Windows Office applications – and a recent update adds the ability to customise the ribbons again, and you can even pick which icons you want on the Quick Access Toolbar in the top-left corner.

The ribbons often have the same tabs as the Windows versions of the same apps – but not always the full set of features. There are some features in all the Office programs that are still only on Windows. Office 2016 for Mac is definitely more powerful than Office for iPad, as you would hope, and it has far more features than the Windows RT version of Office, Office Online or the new Windows 10 touch-friendly Office applications – but it’s closer to Office Home and Student than the Pro version of Office 2013. 

The good news is that as new features are added to Office, they show up on both Mac and Windows PCs – and the monthly updates are steadily filling in missing features already found in the Windows version of Office. Some of these are small things, like being able to have a graph paper background in OneNote. Others are major improvements – switching all the Office apps to 64-bit has certainly improved overall performance. 

The familiar Windows shortcuts that showed up in Excel initially now work in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote as well, which saves those of us who regularly use both PCs and Macs a lot of keyboard fumbling. Many of the function key shortcuts have been the same in Word and Excel on the Mac and Windows for years (because they were in the early Mac versions of Word and Excel long before Office came to Windows), so Shift-F3 cycles selected text through upper and lower case in Word on both Windows and macOS, and F5 opens the Go To dialog in Excel. 

If you know Office on Windows well, there are a lot of other keyboard shortcuts that can save you time, like using Ctrl-; to insert today’s date in Excel. Even the Windows standard Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste work now.

Not all the Office shortcuts from Windows are available though, because there are some (like F12 for Save As) that are already used by macOS for other things. 

At any rate, all the features sit inside a true Mac interface, from the Retina graphics and high resolution document themes to the familiar scroll bounce. If anything, Office 2016 is almost too much of a Mac application, because instead of putting everything on the ribbon the way Office does on Windows, it both splits and duplicates features between the ribbon and the menus. 

That’s not just the file management tools on the File menu where you’d expect them (there’s a File menu in Office 2013 too, which has the options for each program, whereas Office 2016 keeps Preferences on the Apple menu where Mac users will look for them). You get both a Table menu and a set of Table commands on the Insert tab of the ribbon in Word 2016, and the Tools menu and Review tab have almost the same set of commands – but not quite. The Protect Document command is on both the Tools menu and the Review tab – but the Restrict Permission tool from the Review tab is on the File menu instead. 

Similarly, the commands from the View tab are split between the View and Window menus. 

This gives menu fans the option of minimising the ribbon and ignoring it, but there are a few things ribbon users will have to go look for in the menu. Again, OneNote has nearly all of the ribbon features in the menus, but there are menu options – for example, related to managing notebooks – that you can’t do from the ribbon. (If you’re having difficulty tracking down a command, use the search bar on the Help menu and it will pop up the menu you need with the command highlighted; a handy option from Office Online.)

Microsoft is thinking more of Mac users than visiting Windows users, but it’s also far easier to switch between the Windows, macOS and iPad versions of Office without having to hunt for how to do things. Unless we’re talking about using iCloud…

Cloud first

Office 2016 for Mac does the best job we’ve seen so far of integrating OneDrive – better than Office 2013 or even Windows 8.1. Not only does it show you your OneDrive folders by default in the Open and Save dialogs (and the multiple columns of macOS continue to be the best way to handle lots of nested folders), but you can see files and folders that have been shared with you right in the same dialog.

That makes collaboration far simpler – on Windows, you have to start in the OneDrive website rather than being able to open a document someone has shared directly in Word or Excel. Windows users will be envious, especially since Microsoft stripped out the OneDrive integration in the Office 2016 dialogs on Windows in a recent update.

OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint are all in the Open and Save dialogs (and just as on Windows, Add a Service doesn’t list any other cloud services, particularly not iCloud). You can see your own cloud files, and files that other people have shared with you, which is a big time saver. Documents you’ve opened from websites show up in the Recent Documents list, which includes documents from cloud services that you’ve edited on other computers; but there isn’t a central place to look back at them.

If you want to open or save a document on your Mac, or on a network or external drive, click the On My Mac button in the dialog to switch to a standard macOS file dialog (although there’s an Online Locations button to get back to the cloud file dialog).

Perhaps confusingly, the On My Mac dialog is the way you can save and open iCloud files – that’s the same as any other Mac application, so it makes sense that Microsoft hasn’t tried to duplicate it, but it makes Apple’s cloud service feel less integrated than OneDrive, which feels odd on a Mac. Still, as with ribbons and menus you get the Office experience where that’s appropriate and the standard Mac experience the rest of the time.

That Office experience pushes you towards saving documents in OneDrive (and OneDrive for Business and SharePoint) so you can use the new document sharing and improved shared editing features.

Security and sharing

On Windows, Office puts the sharing options in the File menu. In Office 2016 for Mac they’re right in front of you, in the title bar of each application. Click the ‘head-plus’ icon and you can invite people by email to view or edit your document, get a copy of a link (again, that can be for just viewing or editing as well) or email your document as an attachment (in its original file format or as a PDF). The menu also shows you who you’ve already shared a document with and what they can do to it.

With OneDrive, the document sharing is seamless and the colleague you share the document with doesn’t even have to sign in. With SharePoint and OneDrive for Business you have more control and you can make sure people sign in if you don’t want to give them anonymous access.

When someone else is editing your document, the collaboration in Word, Excel or PowerPoint isn’t quite real-time. The idea is that you want the ability to choose when your document gets updated rather than just having sections of it appear, disappear or change without you noticing. A change your co-editor makes to a document gets uploaded when they save it; you see an icon next to the section of the document they’re working on, to warn you against making changes that might conflict with theirs, and the status bar tells you there are updates you can add to the document.

Click the status bar or just save the document and it implements the changes, highlighted so you can see them quickly. Click the icon to see more information about who’s editing the document (if they haven’t signed into OneDrive, they show up as guest) and you can email, chat or FaceTime with them. There are options to schedule meetings that tell you to get a version of Office that has Outlook integrated, so this feature is still a work in progress.

This co-editing isn’t a new thing for Mac users, but it was only in Word and Excel before, and it was rather more primitive. Now it’s clearer and easier to use, and more like the experience in Office on Microsoft’s OS.

On Windows, the option of limiting what people can do with the documents you share with them, and even the emails you send, has been in Office for years – as long as you had Rights Management Services on Windows Server or the new Azure Rights Management Service. Microsoft already added RMS support to Office for iPad and it’s in Office 2016 for Mac as well, so you can send an email that someone can’t forward, or set a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document so that it expires on a certain date and can’t be printed or copied. In Outlook you set these restrictions from the Options tab on the ribbon in the message you’re writing. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint you use the Restrict Permissions options in the File menu (this is another place where splitting features between the ribbon and the menus might be confusing). 

What’s missing is the Data Loss Prevention options in Office 2016 for Windows that let administrators set warnings if you’re trying to share information that might be confidential or against regulations. If you try to mail a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document with a credit card number in it, and your IT team has set up a rule in Exchange, you’ll see a warning in the Windows apps that you shouldn’t be doing this. But with so many updates each month, it’s entirely possible this functionality will arrive on the Mac in time.

Word for Mac

Having started life on the Mac, Word already has very much the same features as on Windows (and much the same as Word 2011) – in fact Word for Mac 2016 keeps a feature lost in Word 2013. When you control-click on a misspelled word to correct it, you can choose AutoCorrect to have the same mistake fixed automatically in future, which saves an enormous amount of time. (The same option is in the Excel spell check dialog, but again it was removed in Excel 2013.) 

When it was first released, that meant the changes in Word 2016 were mostly to the interface. The ribbon is now all but identical to the Windows version – instead of spraying tabs for SmartArt, Tables, Charts and Document Elements across your screen, Word for Mac now arranges those tools more logically into Insert, Design, Layout, Mailings and References (where they are in Word on Windows).

You get the same drop-down galleries and context-sensitive extra tabs for editing and formatting objects, including some task panes for detailed settings like Format Text Effects (although there are still plenty of floating dialogs too). The new Smart Lookup feature is a neater version of a similar option in Word 2011.

But again, since release, the monthly updates have been adding in more of the features previously only in the Windows version – in particular, Word now has the Selection Pane object browser from Windows. The Focus mode that hides everything except your document was originally missing in Word 2016 for the Mac; but it’s back, and now hides all the toolbars. You can quickly insert a screenshot into a document.

And Word now lets you use the same Add-ins as Word on Windows – everything from an emoji keyboard to plagiarism checkers. If you collaborate on documents and work with comments, you’ll be delighted to see that Word now supports threaded replies, making conversations much clearer.

In short, having started as a minor refresh back when this suite was first released last summer, Word for Mac is growing into a closer cousin of Word for Windows.

Excel for Mac

Like Word, Excel 2016 has an improved ribbon using the same tabs as Excel 2013, but the similarities are now deeper than just the interface. 

More importantly, Excel for Mac 2016 includes more of the functions and formulas that are in Excel for Windows (including the Analysis Toolpak for complex engineering and statistical analysis), and the improved Formula Builder is still easier to use than in Excel 2013.

On Windows, it’s a pop-up dialog with a second dialog that helps you fill in the terms of a formula, but is usually on top of the cells you’re working with. On the Mac, it’s a task pane docked neatly out of the way with enough room to list the functions and explain them. Double click on a function and you get the fields to fill in – but you can still see your spreadsheet. The logical grouping here makes it easier for pros to find what they want compared to Apple’s rival app Numbers, as well.

Macros are still supported in Excel 2016, but unless you save your spreadsheet as a macro-enabled file the menu entries are all greyed out so you can’t make a new macro. There’s also a new equation editor (which will be familiar to Windows Excel users), which allows you to pick from common equations or build your own by dragging and dropping terms and functions.

There are more functions in Excel to improve compatibility with spreadsheets on Windows – not all are supported but new functions are getting added in the monthly updates. Only power users are likely to do anything advanced enough to notice missing functions, but it’s good to see these getting added in, albeit gradually. 

The new pivot table slicers help you sift through large amounts of information – they’re visual controls you can add to a spreadsheet to make it easier to manipulate your view of the data. The quick analysis tool isn’t in Excel for Mac, but the Recommended Charts and Recommended Pivot Tables tools make it faster to do quick visualisations. And you still have all the conditional formatting, spark lines and other visual tools to help interpret your data.

Excel for Mac doesn’t have Power Query, but the future of those tools is to move into the cloud Power BI service – they’re already in the Power BI designer app for Windows but in the long-term they’ll move to the cloud interface, where Mac users will get access to them.

You can also install the same Add-ins that work in Excel on Windows and iPad, giving you access to a far wider range of extra tools than Excel has had on the Mac before. The improved autocomplete sounds small but add up all these improvements and Excel feels like a significant upgrade.

PowerPoint for Mac 

PowerPoint 2011 had a particularly sprawling ribbon, with a total of nine tabs. PowerPoint 2016 is neater and tidier and again matches the Windows version. It also gets the Presenter View from PowerPoint 2013 showing your slide notes and a timer as well as thumbnails for your next few slides, which makes it easier to keep your place in any presentation.

There are new slide transitions (matching the long list in PowerPoint 2013 so your presentation will play properly on both Mac and Windows), and the new animations task pane is – like the Excel 2016 Formula Builder – nicer than the Windows equivalent, because tools like Effect Options, Timing and SmartArt animation are visible as soon as you select an animation rather than hidden on a fly-out menu. The new Morph feature creates seamless transitions between slides that have at least one object in common; this creates visually interesting slideshows with a professional look.

There are two new default slide layouts in the blank presentation template, with vertical text (they’re not in PowerPoint 2013, although you could create them yourself). These do look fresher and less comically corporate. What's more, each of the 23 designs also have variants, which combined with the colour themes actually means there's a commendable range of options.

You can now animate backgrounds and, perhaps more usefully, choose the colour for layout guides so they stand out against your design. We like the terrifically handy 3D view of all slide elements which makes it easy to reorder things, while the Selection Pane gives you the same view of objects as Word, Excel and the Windows version, for familiarity.

And the new Designer tool is the PowerPoint equivalent of Excel’s recommended charts, suggesting layouts and treatments for slides with photos, and SmartArt layouts for text-like bulleted lists. (This uses an internet service that reminds us a lot of Microsoft Sway and it’s very clever when it works, but it will sometimes fail to come up with any suggestions for a presentation on the Mac, when the same presentation in PowerPoint on Windows shows lots of design ideas.)

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 the button that lets you quickly swap displays is very handy. And while there are some PowerPoint 2013 features that haven’t made it to the Mac yet, like being able to translate content on your slides or present online directly from PowerPoint, using Skype for Business or the free Office Presentation Service, you can now save a slideshow as a video – a feature Keynote has had for some time.

If you use comments in PowerPoint, getting the threaded comments from PowerPoint 2013 is helpful, especially if a lot of people are chiming in. Annoyingly, the promised feature for comparing two presentations hasn’t arrived yet.

That said, PowerPoint has been getting useful updates so again, this is a worthwhile upgrade that’s far better than the initial incarnation. It has plenty of powerful tools and myriad options for formatting and editing features, even if we miss Keynote’s handy Instant Alpha tool. 

Outlook for Mac 

For many 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. The previous version of Outlook for Mac was an unreliable and underpowered program that was deservedly unpopular. The Office 2016 version is a major improvement for anyone wanting more than the built-in tools, though it’s still not comparable to Outlook 2013. 

You get mail, calendar, contacts and tasks, plus categories you’ve created in other versions of Outlook sync across, and you can view a colleague’s shared calendar next to yours, to see when you’re both free. And if you use Office apps, like the built-in Action Items and Suggested Meetings, they work here as well. We love the longstanding feature which lets you create an event based off and linked to an email.

There are some very welcome improvements here: An option to propose a new time when declining a meeting; the room finder as seen in Outlook on Windows; side-by-side calendars; weather forecasts in the calendar; and the syncing of categories.

Also, there’s smarter email threading which doesn’t think all emails with the same subject line are related, and doesn’t hide half the messages when you expand a thread and previews of messages right in the inbox pane. But our favourite tweak is the option of defining different signatures for new messages as for replies.

You can do a lot more formatting in emails, from using a wider range of fonts and resizing pictures to inserting hyperlinks easily. And if you’re used to Twitter and Facebook, being able to add people to an email by typing an ‘@ mention’ of their name will be handy. We like the new summary cards that clearly show the contact information you need, not the clutter of fields you hardly ever use. Even getting the familiar Command-J shortcut back for forwarding messages makes Outlook that little bit easier to use.

The Attach File button on new messages handily shows the files you’ve been working on most recently, with a link to insert files from your Mac (which is where you’ll find iCloud services) and from Microsoft cloud services. Oddly, you have to add a connection to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business to Outlook, even if you’ve already connected your other Office applications to those services; but once you add one connection all the services you use will show up here.

The Move tool also shows a few recent folders to help you file mail. On the other hand, there’s no equivalent of the Quick Step tool for quick filing and you don’t see favourite folders you’ve picked the way you do on Windows, just the system folders like Archive, News Feed and Clutter. You won’t see any Search Folders you’ve made on Windows either, just the preset Smart Folders. You can make a new Smart Folder to match Search Folders you already use, but the process isn’t as simple as on Windows. And you can’t send email to OneNote the way you can on Windows.

Outlook for Mac includes the Online Archive option (which Microsoft also refers to as a Personal Archive and an In-Place Archive) for moving emails out of your primary mailbox to save space – on Windows that’s an Office Professional Plus feature, and you have to use Exchange as your mail server.

In Outlook 2016 you can move messages into your archive, and view them as well. You might want to consider that option if you get a lot of mail, because currently Outlook for Mac doesn’t let you choose how many emails to download – when you connect an account it grabs your whole mailbox.

Even with these drawbacks, Outlook for Mac is streets ahead of where it was a year ago, but we hope it catches up further with the Windows version. For now, you’re most likely to choose it over the built-in tools in macOS if you’re already using Outlook elsewhere or need it for work.

OneNote for Mac 

The already useful note-taking tool is the app that’s changed the most since Office 2016 came out on the Mac, with the updates adding in many of the key features that were missing in the free version Microsoft released in 2015. 

Interestingly, OneNote for Mac now combines much of the power of the Windows version with some nice interface ideas from the modern Store app – like thumbnails and summaries of each note page in the navigation tabs down the side of the screen. 

OneNote has been getting more interest since Evernote began charging for its service, and it’s a powerful freeform note-taking app, organised into notebooks and sections. It’s closely integrated with OneDrive, and some features rely on the OneNote engine in the cloud – like the automatic OCR that lets you copy text out of images in your notes, or the handy way search shows you when there are more results in notebooks you have access to on OneDrive but don’t have open. 

It also has the same sharing options as the other Office 2016 apps in the top-right corner, which rely on OneDrive. That may be why you can still only save notebooks onto OneDrive in OneNote for Mac – although you can use either your personal OneDrive or OneDrive for Business on Office 365. 

On Windows, it’s only the free OneNote that has this limitation – if you pay for OneNote as part of Office, you can save notebooks on your local PC or on a network server (or even an external drive, if you want to archive them). On the Mac, you have to put OneNote notebooks in the cloud, whether you get the free version or pay for it as part of Office 2016.

Using OneDrive does mean you can access your notes on every device and it gives you extra features like image OCR, but some people might prefer the option of keeping notebooks on a company server. The desktop Windows OneNote does its own image OCR, along with indexing the audio of recordings to make them searchable – it makes more sense for Microsoft to write that functionality once for the cloud and have it available on phones and tablets as well, rather than rewrite it for the Mac. But this means it’s less likely that saving notebooks on your own Mac will ever be possible.

You can password protect sections, as with OneNote for Windows. And you can apply tags to your notes. But while you’ll see custom tags that you’ve created in OneNote for Windows in your notes, they don’t get added to the list of tags so you can’t apply them to new notes (you can’t even copy them to reuse). You don’t get the screen clipper from the Windows version, or the ability to print documents into a notebook, but there is a nice web clipper in Safari for grabbing and saving useful information.

But OneNote is really benefitting from the monthly updates to Office, which have added the much-needed spell check, audio recording that’s time-coded to your notes (so you can quickly go back to find out why you wrote something down), Smart Lookup for researching on Bing directly from a note, and a whole new ribbon tab for drawing and ink tools. If you have a separate drawing tablet with a pen you can use it to write, draw and erase ink, or you can use your mouse or trackpad with multiple pen styles, weights and colours including a highlighter.

These updates mean that while there are still features that you only get on the Windows version of OneNote, Mac users have a much more powerful note tool than before.

On Windows, if you want a competent productivity 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 different, thanks largely to the ubiquity and strength of Apple's iWork suite.

Office 2016 for Mac is a big improvement for the suite, and it continues to improve month by month, making it a strong choice over the Apple alternatives for power users. Keynote is the competition that PowerPoint has to match and it doesn’t quite make it at this point – Keynote is fast, powerful and creates impressive presentations effortlessly.

On the other hand, Word and Excel easily outclass Pages and Numbers for power user features, from typography to advanced functions. You might choose Keynote over PowerPoint if you don’t need to collaborate with Windows users, but for more demanding users Office as a whole beats the Apple tools in combination. 

In our tests, Office 2016 was stable and reliable on a range of different Macs, and performance is a noticeable improvement over Office 2011, at least on more recent Macs. On some older systems we did see slower performance, but again that improved with the recent release of the 64-bit version of Office 2016 for Mac. The real question is whether you need the Office tools or whether the essentially free alternatives are enough for you.

We liked

Office 2016 for Mac feels modern again, and this shouldn't be underestimated – it's once again pleasant and productive to use Office apps on a contemporary Mac system. 

The increasing parity with features across not just Windows but iOS (especially iPad) and Android is very welcome, despite the places where features are still missing. You no longer need to pull out a PC or run Windows in a virtual machine to get a real version of Office on the Mac. Excel in particular gets the professional features it has been missing for advanced data analysis. And if you use OneNote, the integration is neater and more useful than it is on Windows 10.

But the big news is how well Microsoft’s strategy of adding new features month by month is working, turning apps that were initially simple refreshes into significant upgrades from the 2011 versions, with the promise that they’ll keep on getting better.

We disliked 

The most frustrating thing about Office 2016 for Mac is when it’s almost good enough. Getting more of the features from the Windows versions leaves you wanting all of them – whether it’s being able to make your own tags in OneNote or being able to choose how much email to download in Outlook. The monthly updates hold out the promise of getting those features, but you have to hope and wait.

Similarly, Office feels like a true Mac app, but it doesn't integrate more broadly with the Mac ecosystem – especially iCloud. And it doesn’t take advantage of exciting Apple technologies such as Handoff.

The real issue is the competition: Google’s online tools and Apple’s iWork suite, which are enough for many users with simpler needs, and many Mac users will have the latter already, or they can get it for free. 

Final verdict

Office 2016 for Mac is a powerful suite of applications which are getting regular updates that bring real improvements, even though there are still gaps. If you need to share documents with the working world, or move between Mac and Windows environments, Office remains the best choice, and this version of Office means that’s no longer a painful process for Mac users. If you use an iPad, being able to move seamlessly between Office on macOS and iOS is a big plus. And if you use OneDrive, you’ll love the Office integration.

This is a superb office suite, and we welcome what's happened on the surface, as well as the changes deeper down. There are obvious areas for further improvement, but equally those improvements are happening, month by month, slowly but surely. But with iWork being effectively free for many, and in a world where Google's web apps and even Office Online give you great tools for collaborative working, Office 2016 certainly isn’t the only option. 

If you work in business, or education – as a student or teacher – or you switch between platforms, you’ll be glad of Office 2016. If you’re a power user, you’ll definitely need it. And if there’s a key feature from the Office version of Windows that you need, wait a little while and you just might get it.

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