New Office 2016 for Mac now available for purchase – GSMArena Blog

According to Microsoft, all you need to run Office for Mac 2016 is OS X Yosemite, which will automatically rule out any older Macs that don’t support the recent OS. Animations, navigation, and user flow have been redone within the new Office Universal Apps.

Users now running a preview of Office 2016 for Mac can get the release version by selecting Check for Updates from the Help menu of any of the Office applications, but the new version should be detected by the Microsoft AutoUpdate utility during the next couple of days. However, as Computer World indicates, Office 2016 now has some competition.

Office 365 subscribers can use for Mac now Office 2016.

Office 2016 for Mac will bet getting an official wide release in September, at which point the software will begin receiving updates at least once every quarter. This is the incremental update pattern that Microsoft is also adopting for the upcoming Windows 10 operating system. Office 2011 for Mac had some Retina support, but mainly focused on the display and the most common parts of the user interface. You can capture your ideas in digital notebooks and access them on any device. On the Mac, Office received a few updates that brought more security features issued rather than UI and UX implementations.

– Workplace 2013, to be replaced by Workplace 2016 this fall, is designed for desktops and laptops. Microsoft is finally taking advantage of some of those changes, implementing new Mac features into Office.

The new Office suite also addresses general shortcomings with the suite that Microsoft has struggled with, regardless of platform.

The Office 2016 for Mac package sticks to the basics: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.

Excel for Mac now includes chart and graph previews, auto-complete and PivotTable Slicers for helping better manage large amounts of data. The formula builder has been tweaked as well, for better suggestions based on the content in the spreadsheet. The PowerPoint app available for iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone already has the feature. Another interesting feature is an audience-type view, that is displayed on the top left corner of the app, which allows a presenter to actually see how the audience are viewing the presentation, including ongoing animations. Such “threaded comments” will appear next to the relevant text. The improved search can now search for a word or phrase from even handwritten documents, using image recognition.

Outlook for Mac is also created to work with the new Office apps, with push mail support, an improved conversation view, and message previews. “Office 2016 for Mac is now available in 139 countries and 16 languages”. White tabs put the focus on the options available to you. Today, signing up for Office 365 is the only way to download Office 2016 for Mac.

The new software is made available at first for subscribers of the Office 365, Microsoft said, which means that the people who own a subscription for Office 365 ProPlus, E3, Business Premium, Business, Personal or Home will be the first ones to get their hands on the new productivity suite.