Review Word For Mac

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Word for Mac 2011 at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Welcome to our review of Word for Mac 2016, updated on 29 Feb 2016. The biggest and most welcome change to Word for Mac 2016 is the new Ribbon-based look and feel, designed from the ground up for.

Mac users have always been an important market for Microsoft, especially in the early days of Office. Excel, after all, was one of the original killer apps for the Macintosh, and it's about to celebrate its 30th birthday. Excel for the Macintosh debuted on September 30, 1985, nearly two years ahead of Excel for Windows.

That might have been the last time an Office for Mac program was arguably better than its Windows counterpart. In recent years, Office for Windows has been the one that gets all the resources and all the new features first, with the Mac version typically behind by at least a year. On top of that, most of the team responsible for Office on the Mac has been focused on building Office versions for (released a little over a year ago) and for (released last fall). With Office 2016 for Mac,, Microsoft has finally turned the tables. This version of Office for the Mac is arguably an improvement over its Windows counterpart, at least in some measures. A complete rewrite This version is a complete rewrite, with the Office for Mac team moving from its legacy (Carbon) codebase to the more modern Cocoa framework. More importantly, it's left the quirkiness of the old Office for Mac behind.

I don't expect to hear many complaints from Mac users about Office 2016 for Mac, especially if they've already adapted to the iPad version, which has many similarities with the new Mac release. But the real beneficiaries of the all-new design are people who switch between Macs and PCs regularly. If you fit in that category, you have plenty of company. According to Microsoft, roughly 75 percent of the Office for Mac customer base is made up of cross-platform users, typically with a Windows PC at work and a Mac at home. I've spent the past few months using the preview release of Office 2016 for Mac and have had the final build for the past few days.

Sony active speaker system. I haven't run screaming from this version of Office--far from it. Instead, the entire experience feels familiar. I haven't had a chance to do extensive compatibility testing, but so far every Office document I've opened has displayed perfectly.

That shouldn't be a surprise; Microsoft's record on 'round trip' document capability has been excellent since the switch to XML-based formats in 2007, across desktop, mobile, and web-based apps. The Mac Ribbon is now nearly identical to its Windows cousin, with a customizable Quick Launch toolbar above it. Because the feature sets aren't a perfect match, the ribbons aren't completely identical, but the layout and order of tabs is consistent across platforms. To add a table to a Word document, for example, you use the Insert tab, which is always in the second position.

See for yourself: That's Office 2013 for Windows on top, Office 2016 for Mac on the bottom. Color coding matches the Windows programs as well, with Word in blue, Excel green, and so on. If those colors are too much, there's an option to use a more sedate and traditional gray scheme where the color hints are more subtle. The pane for finding, opening, and saving files is reminiscent of the Mac design and conceptually similar to its Windows counterpart (albeit less feature rich). You can connect directly to Microsoft's cloud services: OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint. For other cloud services, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, you have to sync to a local folder and then open synced files from that location. A few other Office 2013 features have finally made it into the Mac version: Themes, which apply predefined sets of styles, fonts, and colors to a document; and task panes, which allow easier access to formatting tools, styles, and other things that don't fit on the ribbon.

Five core apps The five apps that make up Office 2016 for the Mac are the heavy hitters: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. If your business relies on Microsoft Access, Publisher, or another member of the extended Office for Windows family, you'll need to keep a Windows PC or virtual machine handy. And although the new design is specifically geared to cross-platform users, there are still plenty of Mac-specific touches. All of the resources in Office 2016 for Mac are made for a Retina display, Microsoft says (I couldn't test that claim). All of the apps support pinch-zoom and other OS X multitouch gestures, as well as working in full screen mode. I liked the ability to work on charts and large, data-packed spreadsheets using Excel in full-screen view, although that option is much less useful for Word. I'll be very happy when OS X El Capitan finally implements the window-snapping features that Windows users have grown to know and love for years.