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Sunday 8 March 2015

Review: MS Office 2016 Preview for Mac

This is a short review highlighting the pros and cons of this new preview for Mac.
This package will work only on Macs running OS X Yosemite 10.10 and will be valid only for 60 days after which the user will have to update to the newer build.
The Office for Mac 2016 preview is available for download from Microsoft's Office preview site.

Following are my thoughts after installing MS Office Preview 2016 for Mac-

Pros-

  1. It much more polished than MS Office 2011. It is very much alike the Office 2013 for Windows with similar ribbons etc."Microsoft says its goal is to make the software look and feel more like Office for Windows, while not losing the styling that makes the suite feel like it's built for Mac OS X"
  2. The shortcut key for edit has finally been made F2, although control+U still exists. Many other shortcut keys have been changed so that power users of MS Office don't have to relearn all the keys.
  3. Heavy OneDrive Integration. This is a very good thing. You can start off with a document on a Mac or Windows PC, continue it on your Android device and edit and share using your iPad. MS Office is the only office suite that integrates with all OSes. iWork only works with OS X and iOS devices and Google Docs does not have an offline office suite for Windows or Mac. This cross-platform integration is one of the major highlights.
  4. The Office Suite may be free for personal users considering the fact that the preview is free. If this is true, it would be awesome!
  5. It works alongside Office 2011. You can use both if you are not too comfortable with the new preview.
Cons-

  1. The size of the package has increased by 4 fold. The size of MS Office 2011 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint & Outlook) was 1.3 GB. Now the same in Office 2016 has become 5 GB. The size of the final package may be more optimised since this is only the preview. It might be more optimised when the final build is released.
  2. Still no "Save As" option for formats of other office suites such as Open Office. It would be good to have .odt, .ods etc. files to open with Office 2016. Maybe they will bring in this feature in the final build.
If you guys see any cool or new features, do let me know by way of comments below.