Microsoft releases Office for Mac 2016, pledges better OS X support

Microsoft is notorious for leaving Office for Mac users languishing for years between app updates. Now, five years after the last Mac edition, the company is officially releasing Office for Mac 2016 to subscribers of Office 365, and promises that the Mac will be less neglected in the future.

“We’re working at a pace of monthly updates,” said Han-yi Shaw, the engineering lead on Office for Mac. “The days of waiting years for new software — those days are over.”

Shaw says that Microsoft will be able to maintain frequent updates because Office for Mac and Office for iPad share a common codebase, so the two will be built out simultaneously. Yet the new Office for Mac suite — already seen in the Office for Mac preview available for public beta testing since March 5 — is far more like the Office suite you’d find on a PC, Shaw says.

For instance, like the PC, Office for Mac 2016 has the coloured “ribbon” of tabs and menus sitting atop Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and OneNote (now making its Mac debut). In the past, Shaw noted, Mac users would have tabs and menus for the same functions as their PC counterparts placed in different locations.

Microsoft brought the two suites of apps into parity, in terms of looks and feature set, to make things easier for those who work across Macs, PCs, mobile devices and the Web, he said. “If you’ve used Office on any device. you’ll be able to dive in and use Office and any other device now,” Shaw said. “It wasn’t that way in the past.”

Powerpoint, an app included in Office for Mac 2016. Microsoft

There are, however, a few Mac-specific tweaks. For example, Office for Mac 2016 supports Apple’s multi-touch trackpad gestures, and OS X’s full-screen app view. Mac users will also be able to change the colour of each app’s ribbon to grey, if they like a more subdued look. And while the Office apps natively tie into Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service (1TB of data is included in the Office 365 subscription), Mac users can also pull files from services like Dropbox and Box, as long as those cloud services have been set up for access from OS X’s Finder windows.

Office for Mac 2016 is available for download now to Office 365 subscribers. Month-to-month access to Office 365 (which offers access to Office apps on PCs, Android, iOS and the Web, too) starts at $6 per month for individuals and $US10 per month for families and businesses. Microsoft will offer free and subsidised subscriptions for students and teachers at office.com/student