It will sell as a standalone Mac product later this month.)The moment you run any Office application, you know you've left the aging Office 2011 behind. It’s currently only available as part of a subscription to Office 365, which allows you to install Office on multiple devices. Office 2016 for Mac sports a far better interface than Office 2011, integrates well with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and dramatically improves Outlook.(Note: Mac for Office 2016 requires Yosemite OS X or better. But Mac owners had to wait until early July for the final release of the full suite, including the core applications Word, PowerPoint and Excel.It was well worth the wait. Learn how to manage workbooks, use core functions and formulas, create charts.Hints of what the new Office would offer have been out for quite a while, notably the preview of Outlook, introduced in October 2014. Leave Office applications closed while you go through this process.Master the essential tasks in the Mac version of Excel for Office 365.It's a clever way to bridge the worlds of Office and Mac OS X.Not everyone is a Ribbon fan, though, and those who wish it were gone, or just want to give themselves a little more screen real estate, can hide it by clicking a small up arrow at the Ribbon's far right. The usual Mac menu that sits atop Mac applications is hidden as well, although you can reveal it by moving your cursor to the top of the screen. That's largely in part because the Ribbon has been redone, and now looks and works as it does in the Windows version of Office.The Ribbon is far more prominent and now sits close to the top of the screen rather than (as before) beneath a long row of icons for doing things such as opening and closing files, printing and so on.
![]() Office 2011 365 Mac Product LaterAlso, I use the Windows version of Office, and because the Mac version now closely mirrors it, I found switching between Office on Windows and Office on the Mac to be largely seamless.In Office 2016, Microsoft is bringing a common look and feel to the suite across all platforms, which is why this Mac version looks much like the recently released Windows-based Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview. You'll find similar reorganizations throughout all of Office.For me, this reorganized Ribbon has made Office more usable and far more pleasurable to use than the previous version. In Office 2011 you had to go on a treasure hunt through many different tabs to find all that. So now, you use the Insert tab when you want to insert anything, whether it be art, a table, header, link and so on. For example, Word's confusing Document Elements tab is gone most of what was there can now be found in the more logically-named Insert tab. Click the arrow to make the Ribbon come back.Not only has the Ribbon been moved but it's been reorganized, which is all to the good. In the Windows version of Office, when you click the File tab, you're sent to what Microsoft calls Backstage, for doing things such as opening a file, viewing cloud-based services associated with your accounts and so on. I found that exceptionally useful, and hope that Microsoft eventually introduces it in the final, shipping version of Office 2016 for the Mac.Another difference: The Ribbon doesn't have the File tab. As with the Windows 2016 preview, on the Mac the applications are color-coded: Blue for Word, green for Excel and red for PowerPoint.Also missing in the Mac version is one of the more useful features of the Windows version: A box on the far right of the ribbon with the text, "Tell me what you want to do." Type in a task, and you get walked through doing it via options and menus. You have a choice of opening or saving files either to the cloud-based OneDrive or on your Mac's hard disk.It took me a little while to get used to the somewhat confusing OneDrive interface. But it's a shortcoming of the Mac version of Office, even if it's only a minor one.Microsoft has been integrating its cloud-based service OneDrive into both Windows and Office, and so, as you would expect, access to OneDrive is built right into Office 16 for the Mac. It may be that they're hidden so deeply I couldn't find them. In the Mac version, you do that in the Review tab.And I couldn't locate two other features of Backstage anywhere in the Mac version of Office: Checking a document to see whether it contains hidden personal information and managing previous versions of a file. But that still won't offer other Backstage capabilities, such as controlling what changes people can make to a document. Best remote computer access for macBut there are other changes as well.There is now a somewhat awkward collaboration feature that lets two people work simultaneously in the same document. You likely will as well.As with the other Office applications, the main thing that's new about Word is the interface. However, after a few times I got used to dealing with it. However, if you choose a Mac-based file, you’re switched to the Mac’s Finder interface and have to use it navigate to files stored on your local version of OneDrive.Using two different interfaces to open files is jarring at first and takes getting used to. You then have the choice of opening a file on OneDrive or on your local Mac.If you choose to open a OneDrive file, you get the same Office-like interface. Nice try, but I won't be using the feature any time soon - Google Docs is far superior in this area, because it uses true real-time collaboration.Word and the other Office applications get the full-blown ribbon treatment in Office 16 for Mac.On the plus side, there's a new Styles pane that lets you apply pre-set styles to text and paragraphs. That's not exactly real-time collaboration. You don't see the changes your collaborator makes until she saves the document, and she won't see your changes until you save it. You can also navigate by the kinds of changes you've made to the document, such as comments and formatting.One of the most welcome additions to Excel is that it now recognizes most Windows keyboard shortcuts. Click the icon again to make it go away.Word 2016 also adds another useful new pane, the Navigation pane, which lets you navigate through a document via search results, headings and page thumbnails. To use it, go to the Home tab and click the Styles Pane icon on the upper right of the screen - and the pane appears. A number of new statistical functions have also been added, such as moving averages and exponential smoothing.Less importantly, when you click on a cell, your cursor essentially glides over to it in an animated way, like it does on the Windows 2013 version of Excel. With slicers, you create buttons that make it easy to filter data in a pivot table report, with no need to resort to drop-down lists. It was like coming home.Excel now comes with new data analysis and charting features.Spreadsheet jockeys will be pleased that Excel has been powered with many of the features from the Windows version, such as adding slicers to pivot tables. Being a long-time Windows Excel user, I found this saved me a great deal of time on the Mac. ![]() And it's also great for adding multiple animations to a slide, because you can use the pane to easily change the order of the animations, delete animations and add news ones.If you feel that Apple Mail is purgatory, Outlook 2016 will be a must-have. I found it exceptionally useful because it let me control pretty much everything about animations in slides, including customizing the duration of the animation, whether to play sound along with it, and a number of effects options.
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