The free public preview of Office 2016 is download for download starting today, but the real-time editing feature isn’t available just yet. Office 2016 will be available in its final form later this year, and real-time editing is expected to enter preview by early summer. Download Office 2016 For Mac Public Preview For Free Microsoft has just released Office 2016 for Mac Preview, and it can be grabbed for free right now by anyone. With no Office 365 subscription required for using this preview, head over the jump for further details, and the download link.
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. If you can settle for the 2016 version of Office, you can, as of this writing, get it from Kinguin for $23.45 or PCDestination for $50. Remember, to use Office 2019, you need to be running Windows 10.
Well, it’s about frickin’ time that this got some attention…
I’m a patient person, but I’ve been waiting a LONG time for this.
Back in 2010, I was all over the beta and preview releases of Office 2011 for Mac. I’ve been an avid Office user and beta tester since the implementation of Office 95 back in 1994 and 1995. To say that I’ve been using Office since it became…Office is an understatement. Yeah… I’ve been around since the beginning.
So, back to the Office 2011 Preview for Mac – which consisted of just Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and for the first time, Outlook. The main three apps, Word, Excel and PowerPoint have their quirks, but all three are very usable. They may not look or feel like their Windows counterparts, but hey, the functionality is basically the same, if albeit a bit strangely implemented. The Office for Mac Team has been, I think, overly occupied with insuring that Office for Mac looks and feels like a real Mac app as opposed to a suite that was ported over from Windows.
Big surprise, kids… Office is a Windows suite. It’s always been a Windows suite. It’s always gonna be a Windows suite, and its origins AND its UI and are firmly rooted… in Windows. You’re just NOT going to get the UI to look and feel like a true Mac app. Get over it and move on. Folks that use Office for Windows at work want to come home and have the same UI greet them when they use Office for Mac.
They do.
Anyone who tells you differently has either a hidden agenda or is too deeply rooted in the Mac culture and ecosystem to be honest about it. (Yes, I use a Mac and OS X because I didn’t want a Window machine; but I’m not married to it, you know. I may prefer it, but I’d really rather Office look and work the way I’m used to seeing and working with it. I’m just sayin’…)
So, today, I was VERY pleased to see a write up from Mary Jo Foley on the release of the first public preview of Office 2016 for Mac. It’s been a long time coming, and I’m glad that the time is now here.
If you’re already an Office for Mac user and have Office for Mac 2011 installed, you can run it alongside of Office for Mac 2016 preview without “crossing the streams.” This is a big relief for many, as there was a great deal of confusion about the initial preview release of Outlook 2016 for Mac during the Fall of 2014. The original thought was you couldn’t run it and Outlook 2011 on the same machine. Apparently now you can.
From what I’ve been able to discover so far, Microsoft is planning on updating the suite often during the preview and will notify users of the updates automatically through the Office for Mac Auto-Update tool. So, pretty much the way we’re used to getting updates to Office; but at least the thought is… on a frequent basis. Each new preview build has a shelf life of 60 days, after which, the software will expire and not run any more. Updating to a new preview build buys you another 60 days during the Official Preview period. The final preview will function for about 30 days after the suite official RTMs.
The thought on THAT date is – some time (this) Summer 2015, several months ahead of Office 2016 for Windows (which is slotted for release during “late 2015.”
So, what do you get with the suite? I mean, besides revised/reworked versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook? Well, according to Microsoft, you get a suite that is more closely aligned with its Windows (and other platform) counterparts. It’s still supposed to look like a set of Mac apps; but will more of the same features from the Windows version. For example, you get a new Ribbon that looks like the Office for Windows Ribbon. Its tightly integrated with OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and Office 365. It also supports Mac’s Retina Display resolutions out of the box.
Because the suite works with all flavors of OneDrive and with SharePoint, you get to access your data where ever it lives and can save it back to the same location from within the app. No more downloading a copy to your Mac, updating, saving back to SharePoint manually and then deleting the “original” so your new version is the only version there.
Office for Mac 2016 also supports Office 365 accounts, so you get cross platform access to all your stuff no matter what device you’re using. It’s obvious that Microsoft is really trying to level the playing field between all of the platforms that it supports, and that the Windows version of everything is losing its “most favored nation” status, which is a good thing. There should be a consistent level of parity between all of Microsoft’s products on every supported platform.
Microsoft Office should be Microsoft Office whether you’re on a Mac, PC, smartphone or tablet (the latter two of any and all flavors). The only things we’re missing now are Access, Publisher, Project Standard/ Professional and Visio Standard/ Professional. Publisher seems like it would be a no-brainer on the Mac. I have no idea why the app isn’t part of the Mac suite. Access, Project and Visio have well carved out spots on the enterprise side of the things.
I can see why Microsoft has dragged their feet there in the past, but Nadella’s New Microsoft shouldn’t look at those four components that way. If they’re bringing parity to all of Office where Office lives, then we’re eventually going to need those apps. I have need of both Project and Visio on my Mac right now. Publisher would be a real nice to have, and Access… well, with Bento going off the market, there’s need of a decent consumer or SOHO database app, isn’t there??
I’ve pulled down the Office for Mac 2016 Preview and I will be going through it over the next few weeks or so. I will have a review of the suite up for everyone to read as soon as I can pull it together.
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Office 2016 Preview 64 Bit
Nearly 5 years after Microsoft released Office 2011 for the Mac, a new version of the productivity suite is available — albeit only in preview form.
The updated suite, called Office 2016 for Mac, includes revamped versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint along with minor updates of the previously released OneNote and Outlook. Each app in the suite offers full Retina support with thousands of Retina-optimized graphics.
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Office 2016 is free during the public preview, which is slated to end roughly in the middle of 2015, and Microsoft is promising to release frequent updates based on user feedback. The current download weighs in at about 2.5 GB.
Each preview build will expire about 60 days after it’s posted, and the last preview build will continue to function for about a month after Office 2016 officially launches.
Microsoft warns that certain features might be incomplete or disabled, which is to be expected with pre-release software.
Office 2016 has a single system requirement: users must be running OS X 10.10 Yosemite. But those on older Yosemite-compatible Macs may find the Office apps to be sluggish, something that Microsoft could address in future updates.
Office 2011 users who want to try Office 2016 but are hesitant to rely on it needn’t worry because the two versions of the software can run side by side on the same computer.
Office 2016 works with Microsoft’s cloud storage options, letting you access your files on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint. During the preview period, testers aren’t required to register or sign in to Microsoft accounts, but an account is needed to share files across multiple devices.
Once the software is final, users will be required either to purchase a copy of the software outright or sign up for an Office 365 subscription with recurring payments. Those who do not pay will only be able to open and read Office files, not edit and save them. OneNote remains an exception since it has been free to all and will remain so.
With this update, Office for Mac has an appearance that is more consistent with other versions, including its iOS brethren. The control-laden Ribbon, for instance, looks similar from device to device. Other features shared by the Office apps include a full-screen view and what Microsoft calls “little Mac affordances like scroll bounce.”
Word boasts improved collaboration features, including the option to have multiple users editing the same document at once from different machines. Microsoft also highlights a navigation pane for tracking where you are within a document, threaded comments for better document monitoring, an improved dictionary, and a style pane for more readily applying styles across an entire document.
In Excel, keyboard shortcuts are now consistent across the Mac and Windows versions of Office. The app also offers data-entry enhancements like autocomplete and a formula builder, an Analysis ToolPak with a range of statistical functions, and PivotTable Slicers that “help you cut through large volumes of data to find patterns that answer questions.” The file format for Excel 2013 for Windows is fully supported.
PowerPoint features an improved presenter view with the current slide, the next slide, notes alongside slides, and the timer. Other improvements include a bunch of new transitions and a new animation pane for assembling presentations more quickly.
Office 2016 For Mac Public Preview
Outlook, the integrated email and scheduling app, has an improved conversation view to automatically organize the inbox around threaded conversations and a new message preview that shows the first sentence of the message just below the subject line. Mac users who don’t have Office 365 subscriptions are getting their first good look at this app.
Microsoft Office 2016 Preview
Overall, Office 2016 looks like it will be welcome for long-suffering Office users who have had to make do with increasingly out-of-date and functionally deficient software. Yes, it’s only a pre-release for now, but it’s free and sufficiently capable for serious work. And of course, you can always drop back to Office 2011 if something doesn’t perform properly.