Reviews Office 2016 For Mac10/26/2021
If you want to use Office 2016 for Mac now, you require a monthly or annual subscription to Office 365 which will disappoint many who hate the increasingly common subscription model of pricing software.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.Microsoft Office for the Mac I find Microsoft Word and Excel much easier to work with than Apple Numbers and Pages I have on my computer. The biggest downside to Office 2016 for Mac is a) Frequent Outlook 2016 crashes for some users and b) The way Microsoft has decided to initially require users to subscribe to Office 365 in order to use Office 2016 on Mac. (It's currently only available through Office 365 a stand-alone version is coming in September.)While it's great to see a modern, improvement-packed version of Office for the Mac, it's sometimes wearisome that a suite which started life on this platform still doesn't feel entirely native to it, and the long period since the last version has let competitors build compelling alternatives that fit well with emerging work patterns – and has let many consumers discover them.Taken in the abstract, this is a superb office suite, and we welcome what's happened on and under the surface – even if some of the areas for further improvement are glaringly obvious.But on the Mac, where iWork is effectively free for many, and in a world where Google's web apps do collaborative working better, it's harder than ever to justify.Enterprise and education users big and small will be grateful for it since it will help managed systems work more smoothly in mixed-platform environments, but most regular users should try it first to see if it brings any tangible benefits – and to ensure it hasn't ditched features they rely on. Windows10 PRO OEM + Office2016 Professional Plus CD Keys Pack 30.52USD-(after 30.Elsewhere 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.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.And 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.Even 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.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.Microsoft touts the new Task Pane, but honestly it's done little more than dock the floating Toolbox from earlier versions.Overall, Office 2016 still feels a little siloed from the broader Mac world – using its own dictionaries rather than OS X's, say – an approach which is neither empirically good or bad, but whose appeal depends on whether you're invested more in the Mac or Office ecosystems.If your life regularly involves swapping documents with the outside world, the hassle of roundtripping with import/export – not to mention the potential for translation errors – often means that relying on iWork or another Office competitor is a bad idea.If this is you, you'll likely save yourself many a headache if you just bite the bullet and buy Office.Microsoft's Ribbon UI made its first appearance on OS X with Office 2011, but its implementation was very diluted. Interface changesMac users have arguably had an easier time with Office than their Windows brethren over recent years, though that's largely due to the lack of updates. As it turns out, Microsoft is updating both Mac and Windows versions of Office at more or less the same time for the first time in, well, ever with Office 2016 for Mac and Office 2016 for Windows released within weeks of each other.
Reviews Office 2016 Portable Between ThemInstead, they're only rolled out to everyone else when the editor document is saved, at which point they see a clickable notification to see them.The problem is that remote edits aren't tagged by the user who made them they're merely highlighted. Multiple simultaneous edits can then be made in real time, but they don't appear on a local document immediately. Shared editing made simplerEven so, one thing that Office 2016's cloud support greatly simplifies is collaboration, whether co-authoring documents or merely giving feedback.Once a document is saved to the cloud, additional users (using Office 2013 or later) can then be invited to view or edit it. Office documents stored in Dropbox can still be opened in Office Online via its web interface, but that's really a workaround rather than a solution. Better still, Office 2016 now supports the same nested comments as Office 2013 for Windows in Word and PowerPoint, and clear in-document conversations also take much of the pain from collaborative editing.Unfortunately, all of the above only applies to Word documents. Sharing edits with edit trackingEdit tracking really comes into its own when there's only one centrally stored document being worked on, and it's vastly preferable to emailing multiple copies back and forth and trying to combine changes from several people. Fortunately, it's also a problem that's largely solved simply by enabling Office's Tracking feature to show who's changed what and when.Cloud storage makes collaborative editing much simpler, but there are still plenty of kinks to work out. One minor but nonetheless welcome change is a first-line preview of message bodies in the inbox, but there's no delayed delivery of messages and it's a shame Microsoft didn't introduce the Ignore' feature from Outlook 2013 for muting email threads you have no interest in. So it's the rigmarole of creating per-app passwords all round if you're security minded.Outlook 2016 is little changed from before, but the inbox now has one-line message body previews.Otherwise, not a lot has changed in Outlook 2016 compared to the previous version and upgraded users shouldn't miss a beat. Users with an Exchange account should be up and running within moments, but while the necessary settings for an Outlook.com or IMAP account are automatically configured, two-step verification isn't natively supported not even for Microsoft's own Hotmail and Outlook.com services. Outlook 2016Email is still the main stalwart of 21st Century office communication, of course, and managing it is a task that still falls to Outlook in Office 2016. As it stands, Google Docs does a much better job of cloud collaboration and it's disappointing for Office 2016 to lag behind. Share a sheet with another user and they see a "This file is locked for editing byAdmittedly, simultaneous shared editing via the cloud is perhaps most useful in Word, but there are many circumstances where other types of document would benefit from the feature. Word's Smart Lookup' option does at least present a list of readable results, though, rather than the awkward one-at-a-time of Office 2011. Unfortunately, the Scrapbook and Citations manager didn't make the cut for this redesign, so you'll need another option if you relied on those two features.Office 2016's cleaner interface is a joy to use, with no irritating floating palettes in sight.The DTP-lite Publishing Layout view has gone, too, and Word 2016 still doesn't support OS X's three-finger trackpad tap for an instant pop-up word definition. Speaking of which, pinch-to-zoom now works in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, too, which helps smooth the transition between the Mac and iOS suites.Another improvement of note is that the floating Toolbox palette is now a docked sidebar that's much easier to use, with Styles, Reference tools and other options appearing as required. The usual OS X shortcuts still work, but this clever move makes the Mac suite less finicky for someone switching platforms. Word 2016Many of the changes in Word are under the hood the most surreptitious being support for common Windows keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + C to copy selected text, for example (these also work in Excel). Adobe captivate 8 for mac free downloadA couple of new hand-holding options should make Excel's more sophisticated features more accessible. There's still no Mac support for Pivot Charts, however, and the Power Pivot add-in is reserved for Windows users.Excel 2016 placates power users, too, with new pivot table and add-in support, plus a new built-in equation editor.For everyone else, perhaps the most noticeable change is a new animation when selecting and working with cells. Power users will certainly appreciate the addition of PivotTable slicers for filtering data, Data Analysis ToolPak and Solver add-in support, and a slick integrated equation editor to replace the clunky separate utility of Office 2011. It appears once an animation has been applied to an object on a slide, and aggregates the options previously found on the Animations tab (which is still present) and the easily overlooked Custom Animation floating Toolbox.The streamlined interface makes PowerPoint much more user friendly, with slide animations in particular now much easier to deploy.Presenter View has been spruced up, too, and the addition of a Switch displays' button alone might tempt some PowerPoint users to upgrade particularly those who've inadvertently displayed their web browser session to an auditorium full of people while scrabbling for the less-obvious option in PowerPoint 2011. The bulk of creative options now reside on the Design and Transitions tabs, for example, rather than the Themes, Tables, Charts and SmartArt tabs of old.The new Animations sidebar is also a welcome addition for those that don't know PowerPoint inside out. PowerPoint 2016PowerPoint perhaps gets the biggest benefit from the cleaned-up and rejigged interface, and the Ribbon now make much more sense to unseasoned users. You still need to know what you're doing, but the option might help avoid mocking from chart boffins in meetings.The Formula tab has also been cleaned up and made much more accessible to neophytes, with the helpful Formula Builder now appearing by default in a sidebar as soon as a formula button is clicked.Excel 2016 has lots of new features to help novice users, including a formula builder sidebar that appears automatically.
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