Microsoft touts the new Task Pane, but honestly it's done little more than dock the floating Toolbox from earlier versions. The redesigned Ribbon menu groups tasks logically and in the same way as the Windows version, and though there is still a sometimes confusion proliferation of ways to achieve the same things, most would agree it's a good solution to making Office's complexity usable. In Word, each party has to save a document for changes to be propagated (rather than them appearing live), while collaboration truly is live in OneNote, and in Excel, though you can share a document, only one person can work on it at once.Īnd for sure, some apps in the suite are stronger than others Keynote arguably builds better presentations, quicker, than PowerPoint, Word and Pages are about equal for all but mammoth word processing tasks (with the latter edging it for basic DTP), and though Numbers is more capable than many people probably realise, Excel is still undoubtedly the daddy for hardcore spreadsheeting and data analysis.Įven if nothing else, though, Office 2016 _looks_ fantastic – simultaneously familiar to users on Windows but also thoroughly Mac, visually – and the optional coloured title bars help orientate you. Most users will likely never do anything sufficiently advanced to run into this problem, but it's infuriating that differences exist at all today.Įlsewhere there are irksome inconsistencies too collaboration, for example, is still much weaker than with Google Docs (and even iWork), and it's not applied evenly. Note, however, that it's imperfect although, for example, compatibility with Excel 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 Excel power user with this update, there is still friction in mixed-platform environments.

Office 2016 for Mac isn't about features, then, but about improved cross-platform compatibility and feature parity, and it's great that both the UI is more familiar across platforms and that documents are more portable between them.

Office 365 for mac review