Office 2016 for Mac offers a new interface and better features

Mac users of Office who have felt left out in the cold by Microsoft (because the last version, Office 2011 for Mac, was released in October 2010) now have reason to be pleased: The preview of Office 2016 for Mac attempts to bring the suite out of the dark ages and into the modern world.

Hints of what the new Office would offer have been out for a while, notably in the preview of Outlook, introduced in October 2014. But Mac owners have had to wait until earlier this month for the release of the full suite, including the core applications Word, PowerPoint and Excel. (The final version is due to ship this summer.)

The preview runs only on Yosemite OS X and is available for free to anyone. Be warned: It’s a whopper of a download — 2.66GB worth. Even so, I found installation to be exceptionally easy and problem-free.

Keep in mind, though, that this is a preview, and so you should be careful about using it for important work. I found all the applications to be stable, although one time I did have a problem saving a file — Word froze and I had to use a Force Quit to close it. The file wasn’t saved.

Source: www.computerworld.com