Microsoft’s Office 365 subscribers can now get Office 2016 on Mac

A report by Techcrunch said that the updated software will be first made available to Office 365 subscribers-those who are either using Office 365 Home, Personal, Business, Business Premium, E3 or ProPlus subscription. Given the Mac’s popularity in education, it’s not surprising that Office for Mac includes a number of features that will be useful for students, including document collaboration and Smart Lookup in Word, audio recording in OneNote, side-by-side calendar views in Outlook, and more.

We first explored Office 2016 for the Mac back in March, when Microsoft released a preview version of the software.

After years of treating the Mac as an also-ran, Microsoft has changed its tune: Microsoft formally released Office 2016 for the Mac on Thursday morning, even before it released it for Windows.

Initially available to Office 365 subscribers, the new version will go on single purchase retail sale in September.

If you don’t already have Office 365 you can get it here. Outlook will also allow users new options to organize messages as threaded conversations, and OneNote will allow users to share their notebooks and will feature a new search function.

Microsoft plans to roll out the software in 16 different languages and in 139 countries. There are other competitors to Microsoft Office, but none have been really successful.

Word got a new “design” tab to help with document layouts.

There will be two versions of Office for Windows – PC and mobile.

For PowerPoint, Forbes said that the update includes an improved Presenter View where you can find the current slide, next slide, speaker notes and timer. In case you hadn’t noticed, up until the 2016 update Office for Mac has looked quite out-dated and clunky compared to its gorgeous Windows counterpart. It says that with Office 2016, users will be able to access their documents “anytime, anywhere, and on any device”. Furthermore, new styles, and themes added by Microsoft will motivate you to work on these apps. Microsoft has also added the familiar Windows shortcuts to its Office 2016 for Mac apps so you can can use ctrl + shift instead of cmd + shift and others to navigate around. Microsoft says the feature also lets Excel users discover patterns in their data.