Review: Microsoft Office 2016

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It’s been a momentous year for Microsoft. Just look at all the notable and premium hardware they’ve released in the past week alone. Before that, they had major game releases on Xbox One (which is currently routing PS4 in terms of popularity and games worth playing).

Windows 10, which is a massive and major release for Microsoft, has received unprecedented adoption at 130 million installs in just eight weeks. What’s more, Office 2016 is out and available on both PCs and Macs plus there are very serviceable versions for iOS and Android as well. What does Office 2016 on Mac and PC have to offer?

Microsoft Office is the crème de la crème of Microsoft’s software empire, their most important and steady profit center. Now that Windows 10 has is literally being given away gratis to existing Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, it’s the one product people have to pay for or subscribe to. Is it worth it though? Let’s find out.

 

I rely on Microsoft Office, specifically Microsoft Word, more than any other software program (okay, Adobe’s Photoshop is a very close second). It is the standard for creating text documents and while there have been countless pretenders that can edit or save in .docx format, they’re nowhere close to the features, convenience, cloud-connectivity and familiarity that Microsoft Office offers.

This is why I don’t bat an eyelash when renewing my yearly Office 365 subscription, for me and my family, it has become a necessity and as normal as paying for hydro or Internet access.

Parity between Mac and Windows platforms has been an elusive and almost impossible dream for many users. Office for PC has always run faster, been more efficient and looked better than what was given to Mac users. That has always been the case, until now.

Possibly an edict from CEO Satya Nadella, the Office 2016 on Mac and on Windows is very similar. While certain things work faster on PCs (like speed backspacing to erase lines of text), the Mac version at least looks and works generally the same.

I’ve been using both Mac and Windows 10 versions of Office 2016 and find that there are palpable speed increases. Simple processes like opening documents, saving documents and launching and shutting down Office documents seems so much faster.

 

Other improvements include a colour coded look for each of the major Office apps, Word and Outlook are blue, Excel is money green and PowerPoint is orange. The ribbon interface which some of us liked and many of us initially hated, has been refined and improved. It still morphs and resizes at will depending on what the application you are using thinks you are trying to do but all-in-all it has now become pretty unobtrusive and almost invisible.

Funny that there are now dozens of writing applications that preach simplicity and their biggest feature is a plain jane screen to ‘simply type, without distraction,’ an obvious dig at how cluttered and apparently over featured Word has become through the years.

Guess what, in Word 2016, you can press one tiny arrow on the right hand side and the entire ribbon magically vanishes until you need it. There’s also an option to auto hide the ribbon, which is useful when working with smaller displays.

 

Collaboration has improved with Office 2016, this is a feature that competing products and even free services had an advantage for some time. Microsoft now enables real-time co-authoring for as long as all participants are using Office 2016. This is now tightly integrated since you can see your co-author type on the collaborative document in real-time.

This information is easily presented with window panes on applications like PowerPoint showing who is editing what at a given time plus you get the added convenience of seeing their faces via avatars accompanying their names. It sure beats emailing a document back and forth and losing track of versions and changes.

If you need to have an actual conversation or scold someone for slacking off their work on a document, you can use Skype to IM, screen share, talk or video chat with that team member without leaving the Office application you’re working in. So, yeah, basically a worker bee’s greatest nightmare.

The collaborative nature of Office 2016 continues with features like Office 365 planner which offers people “a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.”

Improved version control for documents makes it easy to track and pinpoint who was responsible for what and when. Another collaborative feature geared for project managers who have to constantly revisit work done by members in their groups.

Also included in Office 2016 is Sway, and clever yet simple way to create stories and simple presentations. Think of it as a cloud-connected PowerPoint lite. You can use a mobile device, tablet or desktop to input photos, location information and various other graphics into a cohesive story which can be viewed on different devices.

It’s really challenging to improve on an application that’s the standard bearer and the most widely used by consumers and businesses. Microsoft has made Office 2016 prettier, faster and more open. A reflection of the new Microsoft way, Office 2016 offers user’s similar experiences whether they’re using them on Windows or on Macs and even iOS or Android devices through the mobile apps now available to subscribers.

The push on collaboration is a huge one for students and office workers managing multiple projects with other people near and far plus the ability to be able to integrate seamlessly to OneDrive for backups and for resuming work on another machine or, if need be, on a browser version of an Office app, really makes Office 2016 the smartest, most connected and collaborative version of Office yet.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5