Before today, the latest versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for OS X came with Office for Mac 2011, a suite of productivity apps which you can tell from the name included dated software without many modern features Mac users expect. Office for Mac 2011 was actually first released in October 2010. A lot has changed since then.
Microsoft moved Office from a paid upgrade approach to a cloud subscription model, saw its CEO Steve Ballmer retire and buy a basketball team, appointed Satya Nadella as head of the company, and even released Office for iPad and iPhone.
For the Mac, though, the most capable versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel have only been available as Web apps—not native—until now. As promised, Microsoft is today releasing the public beta of Office for Mac 2016 including all new versions of the company’s go-to productivity apps.
9to5Mac Happy Hour
In addition to being sandboxed and fully Cocoa rather than Carbon, each new app is optimized for Retina displays, features full-screen modes, and cloud syncing between platforms.
Office for Mac 2016 takes the “cloud first, platform second” approach of Microsoft’s other Office 365-compatible apps. For example, multiple users can collaborate on documents in real time when using the same app on different platforms like Word for Mac, iPad, or PC. Microsoft also treats the ribbon tool bar similarly across versions of Office so the user experience is familiar regardless of which platform you’re using.
Aside from being rebuilt and redesigned for the modern Mac operating system, Word picks up some new features like a design tab for managing and creating style and layout preferences for documents.
Microsoft also highlights threaded comments between using with collaborating on a document to making group editing straightforward. A navigation pane on the left of the word processor allows you to easily move and structure content as you work.
The redesigned version of PowerPoint features a new animation pane for making presentations more lively and interactive. Slides can be further customized with tools like transparency sliders and more available.
PowerPoint 2016 also includes a brand new presentation mode for presenters. Each of the new Office 2016 Preview apps can take advantage of OS X’s full screen mode, and the new presentation view is no exception. This provides presenters with an overview of the presentation, the current and next sliders, as well as a timer and other tools.
Excel, an app even iWork fans sometimes praise over Numbers, gains a ton of new smarts in Office 2016. For starters, keyboard shortcuts now mirror the Windows version of Excel so users switching between platforms won’t go crazy anymore. For Excel 2011 users, you can keep the previous shortcuts around as well.
Excel 2016 for Mac now supports functions from Excel 2013 for Windows, enabling compatibility between platforms, and a new PivotTable Slicer allows you to set parameters for data to quickly find new data points from existing numbers.
Each new app features a brand new open and create window, too, which includes recent documents saved to OneDrive from all Office 365-compatible platforms like iPhone, iPad, the Web, and PC.
The Office for Mac 2016 Preview also includes the current versions of both OneNote and Outlook which were released a year ago and last October, respectively.
Finally, the apps in Office for Mac 2016 are preview versions, not the final versions Microsoft plans to release this summer. During the preview phase, Microsoft is especially encouraging user feedback and making the process of sharing your thoughts and ideas easy.
In the top right of each app, a smiley face button initiates a feedback form where you can include your comments, a screenshot, and optionally your email address for any ideas you have or problems you may encounter.
Microsoft is targeting availability for the final release later this summer, at which point an active Office 365 subscription will be required. The suite is free to try without a subscription and can be used with Office 2011 installed. Pricing for a standalone version for Mac without requiring an active subscription is expected closer to launch.
Office for Mac 2016 Preview is now available to try for free and includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote. OS X 10.10 Yosemite is required.
Bring back Clippy!
LOL!
God it’s fugly. Just like it’s Windows older brother :/ Albeit one can praise the coherence.
Finally :)
Reblogged this on Geek/Husband/Dad/Catholic and commented:
If you currently use Microsoft Office 2011 on the Mac, Office 2016 Preview is now available to try out.
@Danny, I don’t care how it looks as long as it’s got a closer match with the feature set on Windows. Office 2011 Outlook is very lacking, for example – you can’t even add a bullet point to an email you’re composing. No delayed send, none of that stuff.
If they make it behave like Windows outlook, I’ll be thrilled. If it looks the same, that’s a hopeful sign.
All I want to know is how will this be priced once the 90 day beta is finished.
If it’s a monthly or yearly rental I will not use it and stick with what I have and change over to pages.
But if this is something that I can buy I will do this.
Does any of the editors of 9 to 5 Mac know an answer???
It’s subscription-based once it comes out according to Microsoft’s website, so I’m afraid that you will have to get Office 365 if you wanna use it. I’m gonna stick with iWork and 2011 Office if I have to send any MS doc. Actually, MS Office on OneDrive is not bad and I may just use that to check my documents in the future.
This isn’t accurate. It will be sold as an Office 365 subscription which comes with unlimited cloud storage or you can buy a single license one time, which is the same way its sold right now.
Actually, it’s subscription first release, and box products as well, just like 2011
In that case, I may just get the new suite. I’m so glad that I was wrong. Thanks guys!
Does it come with viruses and bugs pre-installed, or do you have to do that yourself? What about the blue screen of death? Will we FINALLY get it for our Macs?
Just use iWork; it’s free, it’s bug and virus-free, and it works great. Leave this bloated pos to antiquity, as well as the evil company that made it. Remember, this is the company that made THIS GUY a billionaire…
FINALLY!
Any word on notebook layout?
ugh… they’ve removed the best thing about microsoft word
If you go to “view” and I think it’s the 5th one down you can select “notebook layout”
Looshy Looshy, what version are you looking at? There is no notebook layout visible in the menu or on the interface. This is very disappointing.
I loved iWorks but I feel the overhaul made it take a serious step backwards and I miss many of the features I used. Office 2011 is a cluster. So many features that its overtly complicated and ugly as hell. I wish someone would come up with a good median between the two.
Apple will. They compromised iWork for the mac temporarily to ensure better compatibility with iOS and the icloud.com web versions, which include collaboration (which is very welcome) and which is still in beta. Apple promised to bring back the more advanced features.
Looking forward to trying. Been using Outlook since its release in October. Its OK. If Mail.app would support Push Exchange, and Calendar.app would support Public Exchange Calendars….i would have no need of dreadful Outlook.
You’ll be disappointed with Outlook 2016 then… Had the chance to try it, and it only supports Push support for Office 365 accounts. It seems Exchange servers don’t fully support Push protocol as Microsoft has limited that function (once again) to ActiveSync and not extended it to MAPI or the other Exchange protocols. Also, Outlook 2016 doesn’t seem to auto-load Shared Mailboxes assigned to your user account, and they can’t be added manually either, unless (again) you’re using Office/Exchange 365.
It’s a steaming pile of bovine excrement.
Rubbish I’m using new outlook right now, on my company exchange portal, which is hosted onsite, and nothing to do with 365. It also does support push. How about try it first, before commenting.
Then your company probably uses Exchange 2013; push doesn’t work with Exchange 2010 setups.
I like the color-strip bar at the bottom. (though being colorblind it is hard for me to differentiate…but) I think it is a neat way to connect yet separate the apps.
I do not understand why Microsoft when to a cloud version you have to subscribe to and pay every year for. I wish you could still just buy the software and be done with it. Well, personally in an ideal world it would be like the Pages/Keynote/Numbers suite and come prepackaged, but I’d rather a one time fee than a recurring fee like they have now. Annoying.
Lets not forget the ideal for Microsoft is to make a profit. After all, they are primarily a software company with bills to pay.
Because it’s getting harder to convince people that they need to buy new versions, pretty much every feature in an office suite you can imagine is already there, so they need to find a different way to get that continuing money out of you.
I’m the same… Give me the iOS and OS X apps to buy for a one-time fee, and I’d consider them, just so I can maintain compatibility with those still using Winblowz, but don’t force me onto a subscription (aka rental) agreement for something like this! Adobe started this crap with their Creative Cloud BS, and it backfired on them from MANY long-time professionals, who are now looking at alternatives.
While Adobe may have lost some long-time customers, I suspect they gained far more than they lost. The monthly price for CC, especially considered all the apps you get and the updates they’ve pushed out in the last year, makes it a much better deal for anyone who uses (or wants to use) the Adobe suite than the more traditional sales approach. Whether it makes sense for Office, however, is a different story.
It still seems like a cluttered mess to me. Take that Word screenshot at the top. It has 8 sections, two of which “design” and “layout” are, or should be, the same thing and three more “references, mailing, and review,” that are completely un-necessary for the average home user.
It’s just a big cluttery mess with everything in it (including the kitchen sink) that could possibly appeal to anyone at all. Same old same old, it seems to me.
IMO they should stop trying to pretend they aren’t designing for big businesses and instead really own it. Make the thing as complicated an arcane as it could possibly be, but then also produce a second simple version that actually makes sense, and market it to the non-business crowd.
One of the key values of Office is the “sameness” that loyal users expect. Similar to the way in which long-time Windows users are conditioned to look for a “Start” button, core Office users are generally conservative and want to see many things remain in place for long periods of time. That’s why they still use a floppy-disk icon for “Save” lo these many years since that technology bit the dust. No other application on my Mac uses such an arcane reference, but there it is on the Office 2016 preview.
In other words, the cluttered look isn’t a bug, it is very much a feature. That doesn’t mean it’s a good design choice – it’s not. But it is likely deemed necessary by the development team to address long time Office users, and keep them “in the fold”.
I don’t see why Microsoft would ever make a simpler, consumer-oriented version of Office. The money isn’t there, because the basis of competition changes completely. It also would be very confusing – what gets cut, what stays, and which versions can open what files? The beauty of Office (such as it is) is that you can generally open files from any version, and any age.
I don’t disagree with you. What I’m saying is that they keep pretending that this is something besides a customer designed “for business only” kind of product. They keep pretending it’s a good choice for the average consumer when it’s obviously not.
I think that they should “own” the business thing and put in *more* features that make it *harder* to use for casual purposes, and then create a second product that’s actually for consumers.
This second product wouldn’t be “Office” as you call it, because some of the things that the average consumer definitely DOESN’T need are PowerPoint, Outlook, and most of the features of Word and Excel.
I hear what you are saying, Gazoo. Consumers certainly don’t need all the baggage of Office (that is purely a corporate concern) and could in fact be just fine with the feature sets of iWork and others. The problem, such as it is, is that many people are conditioned to think of word processing and spreadsheets as synonymous with Word and Excel. They could switch to something else like Pages and Numbers, but they are conditioned by decades of this ubiquitous software to think otherwise. My hunch is that Microsoft knows this very well, and so feels that releasing a consumer alternative wouldn’t help them. For them, it’s “Office” or nothing; maintaining that illusion of being necessary is key to the franchise.
Its not downloadable, it just times out,.
Can the file/save as CSV dialogue able to output files in UTF-8 encoding yet?
yup.. not able to download :|
What a surprise…foreshadowing all the lock-ups to come…
the CDN is really crap, VPN’ed to US and it slowly downloads, my local CDN is cached at 16Mb only.
Is there a torrent available?
http://miroir1.trackr.fr/miroirs.php?file=http://miroir.trackr.fr/office2016/OfficePreview.pkg&source=mac
Same issues, timeouts.
I successfully downloaded using this mirror, which was published on Reddit and supposedly set up by someone from MacRumors:
http://miroir1.trackr.fr/miroirs.php?file=http://miroir.trackr.fr/office2016/OfficePreview.pkg&source=mac
I have successfully downloaded it and verified that it matches the official download using MD5.
“Microsoft is targeting availability for the final release later this summer, at which point an active Office 365 subscription will be required”
Well that just killed it for me, and many people I know and work with. Microshit, GO FUCK YOURSELF! I will NOT be forced into paying any god damned subscription to “rent” this hunk of crap just so I can create the occasional PC file for those not smart enough to switch over to Mac yet.
Apple charges 20 dollars a month for a terabyte of cloud storage
Microsoft charges 10 dollars a month for 5 accounts with 1 terabyte cloud storage each, including 5 copies of Office 365 for PC/Macs, 5 Copies for tablets and 5 copies for smartphones
so who can go and F$#k themselves?
I wonder if 2016 Excel will bring back all the features lost from Office for Mac 2004 when I “upgraded” to 2011? Histograms, macros and third party add-ons? Won’t hold my breath!
This just seems to be a way to encourage more people to take up the 365 subscription service. LibreOffice is looking more attractive.
I use Excel on my Mac with an Office 365 subscription. VBA macros are already there – I’ve written some pieces which work fine for me and on colleagues Windows machines too.
Will they include COM add ins so we can use ASAP Utilities? Oh I really hope so!!
I think this is great development, long overdue.
For all those complaining about
For all those complaining about Office 365 subscriptions I think it’s great value. Look at it this way; Apple charges $9.99/m for 500gb of storage. An office 365 subscription is $6.99 for the full suite *and* 1TB of storage. That’s much better value and office beats iWork hands down IMHO. One Drive is far more accessible than the poorly conceived iCloud. It’s a no-brainer to me.
Actually, the full blown Office 365 subscription includes unlimited OneDrive storage.
Agreed, MS is the deal to beat.
For those having difficulties downloading from the official link, a torrent magnet link for the preview can be found here: [Office for Mac 2016 Preview Download](http://tylxr.com/microsoft-office-2016-for-mac-dowload-torrent/)
If I could only download it…even at work on a very fast connection it times out and dies. :(
I have 120 meg speed at home. Can’t get past 10 MB of the download.
Has anyone been able to download it yet? Been trying for over 2 hours and 30+ attempts and have yet to get past 100mb. I have to use it for certain projects, otherwise I’d be all Mac applications all the time.
Try this mirror (it’s been verified to be the same file as the official one):
http://miroir1.trackr.fr/miroirs.php?file=http://miroir.trackr.fr/office2016/OfficePreview.pkg&source=mac
It is not working for many of us and yes I am running 10.10 and yes I know it is a beta. Anyone found a solution?
Total garbage.. I use office 365 at work especially with outlook for mac and ios. It looks like freak’s Windows mobile, crashes, doesn’t work right, and doesn’t support all the features of the windows version…
I went back to iLife products and Apple Mail.
I never paid a cent to Microsoft for office since 15 years ago. Thanks to the crack teams. Always managed to find a retailer version of the office from Chinese websites or other sites and works perfectly. It is updatable as well. So wait for the release date and a few days later dear hackers will release the patch or crack.
r u 13?
I dont get it why MS is moving to subscription based softwares, I hope this will become their biggest nightmare in terms of sales
because they can. and other companies have and are successful even with the complainers out there. Office (like Adobe CC) has been a de facto standard in business settings. Business don’t like spending money however, with subscription settings, they know the set price and can better manage the flow of money. This also helps to dumb things down. they know once in the subscription it pretty much stays that way. With upgrades they had to ask people why they needed an upgrade for $$$.
for people using these applications for personal reasons, some did it because their work uses it and they feel a need to have it, some pirated, some bought, etc. so, you’ll have the complainers out there but there are people who still think they need these apps for personal lives. and will spend the money.
Personally, I HATE subscription model. At work and personal level I don’t upgrade every year/release so it is more money now. and the updates are not as useful as they were 10 years back.
Does it works in Israel? Because I get 404 error when I’m trying to download it :/
I don’t know if it can be downloaded in Israel, but I do know that it has no right-to-left capability, unlike Word for Windows. This is, for me, a major disappointment.
Fantastic. Still a carbon app. Still 32-bit. Just fantastic.
I have all my calendar and contact records in an outlook.com account. Does Office for Mac 2016 FINALLY support calendar and contacts from outlook.com accounts, or just mail like Office for Mac 2011 only did?
Sorry, Thierry, no. See my comment below.
I’m enjoying the Preview so far. My one complaint is that Outlook still doesn’t support CardDav/CalDav for syncing with iCloud’s calendar and contacts. ActiveSync support is still missing, too, so using an Outlook.com account beyond simple IMAP is out as well.
In the contrary, I don’t enjoy it at all ! It’s slower, fonts are so ugly looking (Aller), not fit to page in PPT, Word works like clumsy, Snap to grid works awful in PPT – well, i’ll have to reinstall 2011…
…….but it still lacks Apple Calendar integration. What a let down!!
Is there a way to have notebook layout?
I had all my classnotes, pretty organized with notebook layout… now with office 2016 I can’t see my neat order…
Brutally slow on my IMac