Microsoft began its release of Office 2016 last week, and all the big tech publications have had something to say about it since. Here are some of the most helpful points made by reviewers of Microsoft Office 2016:
- PCWorld: Not quite worth it for home users
Writer March Hachman has plenty of praise for the new Office, calling it a “major upgrade” that “wants to connect you and your coworkers together, using some baked-in smarts to help you along.” But that’s just it — it’s all about the user and his or her coworkers. While the collaboration upgrades might make a world of difference for the workplace, the individual, family or small business owner might struggle to notice the difference.
Hachman’s advice to those people: “Wait. If you’ve never owned Office, the free Office Mobile apps that can be downloaded from the Windows Store are very good — and include some of the intelligence and sharing capabilities built into Office 2016. Microsoft’s Office Web apps do the same.”
- TechRadar: It’s “the right Office for each platform” (Windows, Windows 10 and OS X)
Mary Branscombe focuses on how Office 2016 fares based on whichever operating system its user chooses. Her ruling:
- Windows gets “the lion’s share of tools and features” because it’s been the most popular Microsoft OS over time. Windows’ Office 2016 welcomes some much-needed improvements, though it can be tough to figure out what exactly has changed unless the user is specifically looking for it.
- The touch version of Office (Windows 10) is otherwise known as office Mobile, and it’s seen few improvements since its last upgrade. The improvements it has gotten are to the context-sensitive touch shortcuts in Outlook, the multi-select mode for PivotTables in Excel and the ability to write maths equations with a finger or pen and see them converted into text in either PowerPoint, Word or Excel.
- Office 2016 for Mac (OS X) integrates OneDrive better than any other Office platform. However, it lacks the full bundle of Office applications and its features fall short of those available on Windows — “but what you get has both the feel of a real Mac application and the tools of a real version of Office.”
- The Verge: Office 2016 might be the last major Office updates
Tom Warren writes about how the new Office represents the whole future of Microsoft. Where Microsoft as we know it releases huge upgrades to Office roughly every three years, it’s entering an era of frequent minor upgrades, focused on collaboration and the cloud.
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This, Warren says, is making the Office suite “everywhere” again: “By focusing less on improving the already full-featured desktop Office apps for 2016, it feels like Microsoft has spent most of its time making sure Office works well everywhere you want to use it. We’re going to see a lot more of that in the future, and I welcome the change of focus.”
