Microsoft officially releases Office 2016 to users worldwide

“Office 2016 is about reinventing productivity and business processes for the mobile-first, cloud-first world”. Office 2016 is released for both Windows and Mac. Outlook 2016 will now feature “quick search” that automatically moves low priority mails to a different folder to make things easy for you. It gives you one install (rather than five with a subscription) and a free 15GB of online storage as part of Microsoft’s OneDrive.

Microsoft has updated its suite of Office apps for desktop computers.

These are just some of the many new features included in Microsoft’s standalone productivity suite.

The last time the suite received an update was in 2013 and the new 2016 update makes Office more accessible to a wider set of devices. One of the key ways it does that is through real-time co-authoring, which is now built directly into Microsoft’s native apps (real-time co-authoring has been available in Microsoft’s web apps since 2013). The software is available as stand-alone application, but Office 365 subscribers can also download the software from their account. It’s not clear when the deal will end, either, though it seems unlikely that Microsoft will keep it around forever.

Chanter said Office 2016’s embedded collaboration features would be a huge differentiator for Microsoft’s user experience. The feature allows anyone using one of the Office 2016 apps to create documents with other users, all without getting confused about who wrote what and what was added to the document since they last looked at it. Co-authoring is terrific in a business and home setting. Without altering information used by someone else, multiple users can work together on the same Word document.

Microsoft is releasing Office 2016 for Windows on Tuesday, offering refreshed versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other applications. Consumer and small-business subscribers will begin receiving automatic updates starting next month, and commercial customers will receive them starting next year.

It also boasts of built-in data loss prevention across Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data with tools for IT administrators to manage content authoring and document sharing policies. The Office 2016 runs on Windows 7 or later Windows OS.

Office 2016 upgrades Office desktop apps for Windows. For home users, Office 365 costs $70/year to $100/year, depending on the number of licenses.