For many years, Office for Mac has played second fiddle to its Windows cousin. If you’ve been struggling with Office for Mac 2011 and suffering from Windows envy, your time has finally come. Last week, Microsoft made a available to the masses, runnable on any OS X Yosemite computer. Surprisingly, the feature set of Office 2016 for Mac is nearly on par with that of the Windows version, with the gaps lying mainly in Excel and PowerPoint. Best weather app for mac.

Naturally, we’ll have to wait for the final, shipping products to draw detailed conclusions. This preview edition includes new beta versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as the previously released. (Outlook 2016 has been updated precious little in the past year and not at all since January; it’s.) If you already have Office 2011 installed, the new Office 2016 will run side by side on the same Mac with no interference. [ Looking to run office productivity apps on the go? Check out InfoWorld's comparisons of. Editing in the cloud?

I've seen several posts on how to find the advanced setting for Word to make shift-return not show the weird spacing for justified text, but this option doesn't seem to exist on Word for Mac 2016. You are correct. The Compatibility Option you're looking for is Don't expand character spaces on the line.

Check out our. Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the. ] Note that the preview ain’t tiny. In this beta incarnation, Word 2016 alone is bigger than the entire Office for Mac 2011 suite. You’ll need 5.6GB of disk space and up to 10 minutes for installation, depending on the speed of your Mac. As to be expected, we have no idea how much Microsoft will charge for the stand-alone version by the time it ships later this year. As: “Office 365 commercial and consumer subscribers will get the next version [of Office for Mac] at no additional cost.” Across-the-board changes If you’re an Office for Mac 2011 user, you’ll be struck immediately by the updated interface. If you have a Retina screen, wow -- the interface adjusts itself automatically, and the high resolution comes shining through everywhere, thanks to Microsoft switching over (almost) completely to Apple’s Cocoa APIs.

I’ve never seen Office look so good on any platform (see Figure 1). Unsplash.com Figure 1. Office 2016 for Mac takes full advantage of the Retina screen. If you’re coming from Office for iPad, Android, or Windows 10, the Mac interface is completely different. Office 2016 for Mac unabashedly embraces the traditional keyboard-and-mouse/trackpad paradigm and doesn’t make any awkward trade-offs for touch-driven operation,. Remarkably, if you currently use Office 2011, most of the interface will feel comfortable. If you use Office 2013 for Windows, you’ll be right at home.

The ribbons have been reorganized and the icons redesigned, but almost all of the old Office 2011/2013 options have immediately recognizable analogs in the new version. [ ] There’s no “backstage” in Office 2016 for Mac, as there is in Office 2013 for Windows, so simple file management tasks -- renaming, Save As, delete, copy, move -- aren’t supported inside Office itself.

Office 2016 for Mac bakes OneDrive into the product. When you save a new document, as shown in Figure 2, Office defaults to your OneDrive Documents folder. To save a new file to your local computer, click the On My Mac button.

Microsoft makes it easy to use OneDrive and hard to use anything else. You can add online services to the Save As dialog (click the Add a Service link), but at this point only OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint are available. Presumably Dropbox will appear as an option at some point.

I haven’t heard any official discussion of adding iCloud as an anointed Service link, although you can laboriously save a file to iCloud by clicking On My Mac, then choosing iCloud Drive. To open files, you have to use the On My Mac button in the current Office app. Even if use use the Mac's standard File > Open menu command or Command-O shortcut you're brought to the decidedly non-Mac file manager in Office. You then click Open My Mac, and only then do you get the standard OS X Open dialog. Working with local files, iCloud Drive files, and files in cloud storage other than Microsoft's own services is thus both awkward and time-consuming.

Word 2016 for Mac On the Word front, Microsoft has a clumsy new collaborative editing capability that allows more than one person to work on a document simultaneously. Unlike, which keeps collaborating edits updated in real time, Office requires a manual save on both sides -- you won’t see changes made by your collaborator until she saves/syncs the document, then you save/sync the document.