Microsoft Office 2016 For Mac Serialisation Changes. Soon Microsoft are to release an update to the Office 2016 Volume License installer on VLSC. This update is 15.17 & is the first that has a few changes that may affect the way you deploy Office 2016. These changes are going to be later enforced in 15.20 & onwards. Microsoft's new Office 2016 for Mac is now available for Office 365 subscribers, giving those who await the universal release this September a preview of features to come. The complete version now available to Office 365 subscribers comes after five months of public beta testing and is designed to feel more like. Excel 2016 for Mac review: Spreadsheet app can do the job—as long as you don’t rely on macros Microsoft's spreadsheet app is more friendly to general Mac users, but less friendly to power users. Enter the terms you wish to search for. Select Search Option.
Microsoft have updated their Office suite with a number of new features since Microsoft Office 2013. If you would like to see the changes between Office 2010 and Office 2013 then view our article: Top Features in Office 2013. In this article we will outline all the new features in Office 2016 for Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and general new features across all these applications.
If you are currently using Office 365 then your Office suite will be automatically updated to the newest version of Office (just another great advantage of Office 365!) If, however, you are using Office 2013, Office 2010 or even earlier then these are the new features you will see if you choose to upgrade to Office 2016. If you want to know about any feature just click the header and you will go to a page with more information.
Our Favourite New Feature
Outlook 2016 has greatly improved sending attachments:
Attaching a file now brings up your most recent files to quickly attach to an email
You can also quickly browse files on your PC or browse Web Locations (OneDrive and SharePoint)
You can set file permissions within the email attachment for view only or editing
Files from Web Locations can be attached as a local copy or as the shared file
Microsoft Office 2016 Common New Features
Sway - Microsoft introduces Sway to the Office family, a new way to create visual presentations and easily share them with colleagues.
Work together on documents – Work together in real-time with co-authoring. Documents shared through OneDrive can be edited by multiple users at the same time and you have visibility on who is editing what in PowerPoint, Word & Excel.
Simple File Sharing – Quickly share files with the new ‘Share’ button in the top right hand corner of PowerPoint, Word & Excel.
“Tell me” - New search functionality that gives users the ability to type what they want to do and get the answer immediately (in PowerPoint, Word & Excel)
Version History improvements - Users can click on File> History to view previous versions of their document and restore old versions.
“Insights” – Right-click on a word and select ‘Smart Lookup’, use the Review tab or use the “Tell Me” box to get information from Bing snapshot, Wikipedia, Bing image search and Oxford Dictionary directly within the app you’re working in.
New Office Theme sets – You can choose a ‘Colourful’ theme or ‘Black’ theme now, which is done by going to File> Options> General
InfoPath - Infopath has been removed (but Infopath 2013 will be supported until April 2023)
Ink Equations – This was already available in OneNote but now can be used in Word, Excel & PowerPoint giving users the ability to physically write maths equations (called “inking” by Microsoft) and covert to text. Go to Insert> Equation> Ink Equation.
Integration with other apps including SAP, Salesforce, Uber and DocuSign.
Improved User Interface for touch devices.
Outlook 2016 New Features
Improved attachments – We’ve already mentioned our favourite new features: the ability to attach most recent files intuitively, improved cloud attachment features and the ability to change file permissions in email.
Improved Search – Search is faster and more reliable and also suggests people and keywords when you start typing.
New Outlook Groups instead of distribution lists (Office 365 Enterprise mailboxes only). This gives you the ability to:
Create and manage groups
Keep updated on group activity within Inbox
Access group conversation history - even from before you joined
Gather all related documents from the group in OneDrive
Schedule meetings on a group calendar that everyone in the group can update
Distribution list
Clutter Folder – Clutter is a new folder in your Inbox that determines emails that are unimportant to you and stores them in a separate folder. This can be turned on or off.
Tell Me – As with Word, Excel & PowerPoint, you can use ‘Tell Me’ to ask a question and quickly find the answer.
Word 2016 New Features
Real time co-authoring - This fantastic new feature lets two authors work on the same document (when saved in OneDrive) at once and see the updates in real-time for more effective co-authoring.
Improved Version history – Go to File> History to see a complete list of changes made to your document and access earlier versions.
Improved grammar checker - The grammar checker is being entirely rebuilt to be improved so expect some changes here too.
Plus, as mentioned in Common New Features: ‘Tell Me’, Quick File Sharing, Insights & Real-Time Co-authoring.
PowerPoint 2016 New Features
PowerPoint Designer – Designer automatically generates visual designs for your content so you can pick a pre-made design to improve the appearance of slides.
PowerPoint Morph – Easily add impressive transitions and animations to your slides.
Co-authoring – Work with your colleagues on the same PowerPoint presentation by saving it to OneDrive to use real-time co-authoring and easily see who else is working on the file.
Quick Shape Formatting – Introduction of more default shape styles available in the Format tab.
Plus, as mentioned in Common New Features: ‘Tell Me’, Quick File Sharing, Insights & Real-Time Co-authoring.
Excel 2016 New Features
New chart types – There are 6 new types of charts
Box and Whiskers
Waterfall
Statistical: Histogram and Pareto
Pareto
Hierarchical: Treemap and Sunburst
Create Funnel Charts – Create funnel charts to show cascading information easily
Built-In Power Query – Previously this was an add-on but now is built into Excel under the ‘Data’ tab.
One-click forecasting
3D Maps – Previously Power Map (add-on), 3D Maps are now built in to Excel under the ‘Insert’ tab.
Time grouping and Pivot Chart Drill Down
Enhancements to PivotTable
New Excel Templates – New templates that you can quickly use, which appear as you start Excel, including:
Calendar Insights
Stock Analysis
My Cashflow
DLP (Data Loss Protection)
Improved autocomplete – You no longer need to spell formulas and functions exactly, for example you can put ‘DAYS’ and it will bring back ‘NETWORK DAYS’.
New Functions – TEXTJOIN, CONCAT, IFS, SWITCH, MAXIFS and MINIFS.
Publish to Power BI
Plus, as mentioned in Common New Features: ‘Tell Me’, Quick File Sharing, Insights & Real-Time Co-authoring.
What next?
Office 2016 For Mac Version History
If you want to start using Office 2016, then we would recommend Office 365 as it’s a cost effective monthly package that includes a wide variety of enterprise level apps and which updates automatically, so you never have to worry about missing out on the latest updates, such as Office 2016. Get in touch to organise a demo or if you're already using Office 365 then we'd love to show you recent new features to make sure you're getting the most value.
First look Microsoft has released a self-destructing preview of Office 2016 for Mac – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote – but it still is not the equal of its PC counterpart.
Should Office work as well on OS X as on Windows? You can imagine the question being debated on Microsoft's Redmond campus. Is it better to keep users hooked on Office and Exchange whatever computer or device they use, or to preserve a key selling point for Windows, given that many business users live in Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint?
The appearance of decent-though-cut-down versions of Office for iOS and Android suggests that opinion has tilted towards making Office work well everywhere. But a first look at the new Office 2016 preview suggests that Mac Office, while improving, has yet to catch up with Office 2013, let alone with whatever may be in the new Windows Office that's expected later in 2015.
Office 2016 preview is a substantial 2.66GB download but it's easy to install, provided you have the 10.10 'Yosemite' flavour of OS X. Earlier versions are not supported. Another possible compatibility headache is that Outlook 2016 only supports Exchange 2010 or higher. The preview can work alongside Office 2011 and will run for up to 60 days.
Microsoft does seem to be bringing the visual design of Office on the Mac more closely into line with Office on Windows and on devices. The curvy app icons in Office 2011 were unique, while the Office 2016 icons are the same as those on Windows. The ribbon in Excel 2016 looks more like Excel 2013 than Excel 2011 for Mac, complete with the washed-out effect that was part of Microsoft's 'content-first' strategy. Mac studio fix powder plus foundation price. There are still obvious differences, though; for example, menu headings are in all caps only in Office 2013.
The ribbon toolbar in Excel 2011, Excel 2016, and Excel 2013
A big change, appearance aside, is that Office 2016 now ties in properly with Microsoft's cloud services. Opening documents from and saving them to either the consumer or business versions of OneDrive is built-in, and the 'Open Recent' feature now shows you recent files across all your computers – presuming you have signed into a Microsoft account.
Considering the five-year gap between Office 2011 and Office 2016, the official list of what's new is surprisingly short, though it only covers major features. In summary:
Throughout Office, Microsoft promises full Retina Display support as well as Full Screen view (click the green icon at top left to enter or exit full screen view), and the redesigned Ribbon mentioned above.
There are new themes, styles, and templates in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Word and PowerPoint support threaded comments.
Threaded comment in Word 2016. OK, I am talking to myself.
Excel has added support for the Analysis Toolpak (a collection of data analysis wizards), PivotTable slicers (buttons for filtering data in a PivotTable report), a Recommended Charts wizard, and an Equation Editor (replacing Office 2011's ancient and separate Microsoft Equation Editor). Most Excel 2013 functions are now supported. The formula builder has been improved, and print to PDF has been added.
Word gets a new Design tab for applying themes and styles, and an improved navigation pane (replacing Document Map).
PowerPoint gets an improved Presenter View, support for PowerPoint 2013 transitions, and an enhanced animation pane for managing animations. Saving to a QuickTime movie has been chopped.
Outlook has support for Message Preview (seeing the first line of an email in the list of messages), and Online Archive, a feature of Office 365 Enterprise or Exchange.
OneNote is now bundled with Office, though since Spring 2014 this app has been free on all platforms.
The above might make it sound as if not much is new. But in fact the look, feel, and performance of Office 2016 are all substantial advances from Office 2011, and there are many small changes I haven't mentioned.
Moreover, while Outlook 2011 was hardly usable on my Core i5 Mac Mini, Outlook 2016 works well even with my unreasonably large Exchange 2010 mailbox. If you use Office 365 or personal OneDrive, Office 2016 works smoothly, where with the the previous version it was a struggle.
Microsoft has also struck a good balance between preserving a common user interface across all versions of Office and fitting in with the Mac user interface. It will not please everyone, but for those who use Office both on Windows PCs and on Macs, the transition is much easier.
That said, Office 2016 does nothing to change my opinion that serious Office users should stick with Windows. Even though it is a couple of years on from Office 2013, there is hardly anything here that is not already in the Windows edition; this is a partial catch-up.
For one thing, the current preview is 32-bit only, whereas 64-bit Office has been available on Windows for many years (although Microsoft recommends the 32-bit version for most users, for compatibility reasons). And while Excel for Mac now has PivotTable slicers, what about PowerPivot, which has been available on Windows since Excel 2010?
There is evidence, though, that Microsoft is working to divide Office into two different variants: full Office on Windows and Mac, and a cut-down version for tablets and phones. There is hope that in time Mac uses will not have to suffer an inferior Office. Then again, perhaps Microsoft does not mind if there is at least one strong business reason to run Windows. ®