AppleInsider Staff
Microsoft on Thursday announced that Office 2016 for Mac — Â a totally revamped version of its venerable productivity suite — Â is now available to any Mac user with an Office 365 subscription.
The updated suite includes redesigned, rewritten versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. Each application now features a metro-style user interface, which brings the design of Microsoft's stalwart software package in line across all the platforms for which it's available.
A slew of new features have also been added, though the apps have yet to quite reach feature parity with their Windows cousins. Mac users can now invite colleagues to edit Word documents together in realtime, for instance, but crowdpleasers like Excel's Quick Analysis are still missing.
AppleInsider got an early look at the new suite in March, and we've been using them as our daily drivers since that time. The changes are almost without exception for the better, and the community interaction during development —  Microsoft says users of its preview have provided more than 100,000 pieces of feedback —  point to a renewed Microsoft commitment to the Mac.
For now, Office 2016 for Mac is only available to users with active Office 365 subscriptions, which start at $69.99 per year. To soothe the inevitably ruffled feathers of consumers used to purchasing their software outright, Microsoft promises "updates and new features for Office 365 customers at least once per quarter."
For those who still don't want to subscribe, Microsoft says that a separate version for standalone purchase will be available in September, though pricing has yet to be revealed.
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
43 Comments
Does anyone know if Microsoft enabled multi-core calculation in Excel in this new version for Mac? The old version was hamstrung for business use in the case of huge spreadsheets.
Does anyone know if Microsoft enable multi-core calculation support for Excel?
For those who still don't want to subscribe, Microsoft says that a separate version for standalone purchase will be available in September, though pricing has yet to be revealed.
Hopefully it'll be offered as part of HUP. As an enterprise customer, I can get Office for $10 (which is about all it's worth to me).
Microsoft Pain and Suffering 2016 for Mac.
Big fan of Office 365 and Office 2106 here (hey, stop throwing things at me) and would say that Apple missed a big opportunity to take market share from Microsoft Office. Just anecdotally and from supporting 100s of Mac users (and 1000s of Windows users), Pages, Numbers, Keynote are so fantastic but never got enough traction to threaten MS Office share. Apple has done a great job convincing people that Windows has so many drawbacks and that OS X would be a safe and even better replacement. I was hoping for the same treatment for MS Office. Office 2011 was a (deliberately, I believe) horrid port of Office for OS X. There was so much room for converting people to another solution. But there was no decent replacement. Mac Mail could have swooped in and supported many (most) of the features of Outlook 2011. I'm guessing that MS Office's popularity on OS X will only improve with this release. They have a decent entrenched user base already and this new version finally brings feature and design parity to OS X. Anyway, I'm giving up hope that the Apple Productivity apps will give MS Office any competition.