Excel for Mac 2016 Love it or hate it, there’s nothing quite like Excel for managing lists, handling large quantities of figures, generating graphs and analysing trends. I’ve used it for years for building feature tables and graphs for comparative group tests in magazine reviews, calculating printer costs and heat-mapping wireless router performance. Over the years, I’ve appreciated how hard Microsoft has worked to come up with new, genuinely useful features to add in each update of this now-venerable application. I used to think Excel was sufficiently powerful, but features such as conditional formatting, sparklines and slicers have proved me wrong over the years.

None of these are what you might term “killer” features, but their gradual accretion has turned Excel into a must-have product for many people, including me. Excel for Mac 2016 follows this long-established trend: despite its long gestation, it has few landmark features.

The obvious changes are a new look and a reorganisation of the ribbon toolbar, both of which are indubitably good things. Working in an environment where the tools you need are easier to find is good for productivity, but it’s no Eureka moment. The same goes for the seemingly frivolous cell and highlight-selection animations: although they don’t add anything meaningful to the Excel toolkit, the way the cell highlighter moves smoothly between cells makes the application feel more modern without breaking what’s already there. There will always be people resistant to such changes, but I think they add a polish to Excel that wasn’t there before, and that makes me happy. I’m less convinced by Microsoft’s attempt at providing shortcut keys for Windows users, however.

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac 1 user, Mac Key Card at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Microsoft released a preview version of Office 2016 for Mac a few months ago, and there was a slight sense of anti-climax when it became apparent that some aspects of the 'new' suite weren't new.

As in Word, the Ctrl+C/V/X/Z key combinations now work in the same way as Cmd+C/V/X/Z have always done. At first, this might seem to be a good idea, but it’s sure to cause further confusion down the line as users switch between Microsoft apps and others that don’t recognise Windows-style shortcuts.

It’s made worse by the fact that, across the Office for Mac 2016 apps, Windows shortcuts are applied without any consistency. For example, in Excel, it’s possible to hit Ctrl+Home to go to the top-left cell in a spreadsheet and Ctrl+End to go to the bottom right, but these combinations don’t work in Word, and none of the shortcuts seem to work in PowerPoint. Best photo collage app for mac.

Still, in general, Excel is more pleasant to use than it was before, and Microsoft’s other tweaks make much more sense. Full support for Retina displays means even the smallest text on the fiddliest spreadsheets is now readable. Multitouch touchpad support is arguably even more useful than that: being able to pinch-zoom and two-fingered swipe to pan around large spreadsheets is fantastically powerful. If only it worked this well in the Windows version. Although many of the rest of Excel for Mac’s new features simply bring the application into line with Excel 2013, there’s still plenty to get your teeth into.

Microsoft’s Recommended Charts tool takes the guesswork out of generating graphs from vast sprawls of data – although the Mac version lacks the pop-up selector tool of the Windows edition. Pivot tables – a potent tool used for summarising large swathes of data containing duplicate values (think sales figures) – also gains a Recommended tool.

Located on the Page Layout tab, this gives users a quick way to generate a suitable pivot table with a single click, instead of having to guess which field to drag where in the builder. Pivot tables have also gained slicers – buttons that let you apply filters with a single click – and there are a number of other small features that may or may not make your life easier: Excel for Mac now supports most of the functions supported by the Windows version; OS X users can now install the Analysis Toolpak add-in (a set of data analysis tools for statisticians); and there’s a new equation editor and formula builder. Not so good As with Word for Mac 2016, however, there are some features missing. There’s no Power View, for instance, nor Pivot Charts or Power Query, all tools Windows users have been using since 2013.