Windows users will be envious, especially since Microsoft stripped out the OneDrive integration in the Office 2016 dialogs on Windows in a recent update. That makes collaboration far simpler – on Windows, you have to start in the OneDrive website rather than being able to open a document someone has shared directly in Word or Excel. Not only does it show you your OneDrive folders by default in the Open and Save dialogs (and the multiple columns of macOS continue to be the best way to handle lots of nested folders), but you can see files and folders that have been shared with you right in the same dialog. Office 2016 for Mac does the best job we’ve seen so far of integrating OneDrive – better than Office 2013 or even Windows 8.1. Microsoft is thinking more of Mac users than visiting Windows users, but it’s also far easier to switch between the Windows, macOS and iPad versions of Office without having to hunt for how to do things. (If you’re having difficulty tracking down a command, use the search bar on the Help menu and it will pop up the menu you need with the command highlighted a handy option from Office Online.) Again, OneNote has nearly all of the ribbon features in the menus, but there are menu options – for example, related to managing notebooks – that you can’t do from the ribbon. This gives menu fans the option of minimising the ribbon and ignoring it, but there are a few things ribbon users will have to go look for in the menu.

Similarly, the commands from the View tab are split between the View and Window menus. The Protect Document command is on both the Tools menu and the Review tab – but the Restrict Permission tool from the Review tab is on the File menu instead.

You get both a Table menu and a set of Table commands on the Insert tab of the ribbon in Word 2016, and the Tools menu and Review tab have almost the same set of commands – but not quite. That’s not just the file management tools on the File menu where you’d expect them (there’s a File menu in Office 2013 too, which has the options for each program, whereas Office 2016 keeps Preferences on the Apple menu where Mac users will look for them). If anything, Office 2016 is almost too much of a Mac application, because instead of putting everything on the ribbon the way Office does on Windows, it both splits and duplicates features between the ribbon and the menus.

Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac at Amazon for $100.79 (opens in new tab)Īt any rate, all the features sit inside a true Mac interface, from the Retina graphics and high resolution document themes to the familiar scroll bounce.

Microsoft office 2016 for mac free