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Microsoft Office, that suite of applications that no one can seem to get by without. Whether you’re a primary student in school, a university major or an aging businessman, chances are you’ve used at least one of the Microsoft Office apps in some shape or form. The release of Office 2016 marks almost three years since the last major version of Microsoft’s productivity apps. And there’s a reason it needed revamping; more than a billion people use Office, for everything from simple word processing and personal finances, to powerful number crunching to see how much DPS your raid party is dishing out. It’s as far reaching as the Windows operating system itself, but why should you get it?
The first thing you have to take in mind is that Office 2016 is best used when you subscribe to Office 365, though you can get it as a standalone product. With that out of the way, here’s the Absolute review of Office 2016:
Office 2016 is all about collaboration and Microsoft believes that you should get the latest version of Office — but more importantly, it wants you to get on the new way of thinking about Microsoft software: constantly updated, available in the cloud and getting new features all the time. But for the average user, it just depends if the new features are worth parting money for and for the most parts the individual applications have very few new features, instead focusing on the collaboration side of things.
Design and Interface
First thing’s first, Office 2016 doesn’t look all too different from Office 2013, all the features are in the same places, the record macro tool is still for some reason in the View menu and so forth. If anything, navigating any of the Office 2016 apps has become incredibly easy due to the “Tell me what you want to do…” search bar at the top of every application. Rather than navigate through all the tabs for a specific feature like the “Record Macro” button, you can just type Record Macro and you’ll have to just hit the enter key to start recording a macro. However, what this means is that you’ll never exactly know where stuff is located.
There are some useful improvements to the backstage menu; on the Info pane, you see more of the details about your file without having to click again to see all details, like how many words are there in the document, the total editing time and so forth.
Another great feature is the share button situated at the top right of every Office 2016 app; sharing this review for instance was incredibly easy.
Collaboration
This section is written by Kevin Sebastian.
Office 2016 does have a refreshing new look and keeps things within familiar territory, most notably however, is with the integration of Office 365, it gives a lot of people or business the option to collaborate and it’s also made sharing documents and information so much easier.
Between Khalid and I, we can share OneDrive links between Word, Powerpoint or Excel and the share option lets you link to the document where you can download and edit either on Office online or on Office 2016. Best part? Multiple people can edit a shared document if you let them, it’s great to edit subsections and it would work well in group assignments with live co-authoring. You can almost see the changes right away and saves automatically reflecting changes. Powerpoint too has a sharing feature which lets you compare differences between files.
Of course this would mean dealing with unnecessary changes to which the author can block authors if they so wish. Sometimes when live edits are being made, you can’t immediately see the difference unless you click on the paragraph. With all this tension going on, it’s a good feature that while you can block an author, you won’t be able to edit a paragraph if they’re currently working on it. This is where you can effectively communicate to them via IM or chat that you’re happy with the current version. That said, tracking these changes also happens on the file history, that change tracking feature is sadly not on OneDrive so you’ll have to resort to manually updating it for now.
Live authoring is available to word and it makes sense to do that now and then move that feature across all of the Office applications, there’s a great potential for it.
Excel
Of all the Office 2016 apps, Excel saw the least of changes and that’s due in part to Microsoft not willing to mess with Excel too much since entire professions essentially live on Excel as their everyday tool. Like modern calculator apps, Excel must meet the needs of a disparate group of individuals: statisticians, financiers, and DPS number crunchers in World of Warcraft, to name just a few.
I’ve typically thought of Excel, like PowerPoint, as an offline application. Not anymore. Not only does it make more sense to post a link to an online workbook that others can use and manipulate, the complexity of these documents means emailing them back and forth simply isn’t practical. I know this for a fact having done part time work for a consulting agency located in Dubai where I was figuratively chained to a desk as I did my best to coordinate a bunch of spreadsheets amongst the office staff. Instead of interacting with a document, Excel users now have a virtual workspace. I was also a little shocked to notice that Excel loaded only a handful of templates if I wasn’t connected.
Under the hood, die hard Excel users are going to find lots to salivate over in Excel 2016, with pivot tables that can handle dates, plus new charts and graphs that emphasize business intelligence—the new watchword for Excel. Excel 2016 also adds the ability to forecast results, extrapolating revenue growth to see how far your cat grooming business has flourished a few years down the road. You’ll also find Power Query, an Excel feature that lets you pull in “live” sources of data from databases and Web pages, or your own corporate data. There is also a feature that lets you write equations by hand, which is great for Surface users.
Note that Excel (and PowerPoint) use staggered, turn-by-turn, quasi-real-time collaboration. However, changes are coming to each of these apps to enable Word’s real real-time collaboration.
Word
I remember using Word back in primary school, my face awash with delight as I used Comic Sans as my default font when not using Word Art. For the most part, Word is same, though there is one new feature: Smart Lookup, also known as Insights.
Right-click a word or phrase in Word 2013, and a limited number of options pop up: a small formatting window, as well as options for spelling, linking the phrase, and checking grammar. In Word 2016, you get more—including options to translate the word or phrase, find synonyms, and so on.
With Office 2016, Smart Lookup takes the Review > Define command from Word 2013 and gives it a Redbull cum steroids turbocharge. With both the old Define and the new Smart Lookup, a right-hand pane provides additional information. But whereas Define used Bing to explain the word in question, Smart Lookup provides context: the definition, plus content from Wikipedia, Bing Image Search, Bing’s Web search, and more. You can cut and paste text from Smart Lookup, or drag an image into the body of the text without ever having to Alt Tab to your browser of choice.
To take it a step further you can also install the free Wikipedia app which can be utilised by highlighting a word or phrase and then clicking the Wikipedia app to open a more robust version of Wikipedia. Even better, any image that appears in the pane can be clicked once to add it to the text, with attribution (and license info) automatically appended. It also searches on any text you highlight as you’re writing or editing.
One thing I sadly noticed how ever is that to fully utilise all the features and extra panes, you’ll really need a widescreen monitor; you could potentially have a sharing pane, revision pane, Insights pane, and Wikipedia pane all on the side of your main document.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint, that tool university students both hate and love at the same time, and something I spend lengthy amounts of time to make presentations of my cats, is another application that has seen minimal change.
The “Tell me what you want to do…” button is still there in it’s full suggestive glory, but other than that not much has changed. There is a Morph Transition but it is only available to Office 365 subscribers. Another feature that is locked to Office 365 subscribers is the PowerPoint Designer a new service that lets you take your content and automatically generate a variety of ideas that you can choose from to make your slides look better. When you add a photo or other unique visual content, the Designer pane will open automatically with a variety of suggested visual treatments you can choose to apply to your slides.
OneNote
Again, keeping in tune with minimal changes, OneNote also has a few new features, though it is one of the applications that interacts superbly with Microsoft Edge. With Microsoft Edge, you can write directly onto the web browser and even highlight sentences and so forth. With Office 2016 you can export your notes to the OneNote application.
You can also insert videos into a page in OneNote.
Outlook
Outlook 2016 is probably one of the best applications in the Office 2016 suite, since it is the collaboration hub of Office 2016. Microsoft has added a number of small conveniences to Outlook 2016. For one thing, if you want to add an attachment, Outlook pulls down a list of recently used and modified files across all of the Office applications. If you want to email an enormous file (say, 700 megabytes) Outlook will email a link to the file stored in OneDrive, rather than clogging your network and mail folders by emailing the file itself.
Another small improvement is the fact that the search tool is much faster and reliable.
Unfortunately, the bulk of Outlooks new features are locked behind the Office 365 Work subscription so standalone product buyers will be missing quite a lot. These are the Office 365 features:
The flagship feature of Outlook 2016 is a new Groups feature, which carves out a portion of Outlook—and Office, to a lesser extent—into a series of small, flexible teams that you or a colleague can create. Instead of exchanging emails, the dynamic here is more conversational. But that’s not all: Groups interacts with a Web app that Microsoft calls the Planning Hub (sort of an online version of Trello) as well as its new app for surfacing enterprise content, Delve. So it probably makes the most sense to view them as a cohesive whole. As a result, it’s perfect communication tool for the workplace.
Another feature is Clutter. Clutter helps you move low priority messages out of your Inbox so that you can easily scan for important messages. Clutter analyzes your emails, and based on your past behaviour, determines the messages that you’re most likely to ignore. It then automatically moves those messages to a folder called Clutter so that you can review them later.
You can even help Clutter learn your preferences faster by manually moving items in or out of the Clutter folder.
Verdict
After quite a while of testing and rummaging around in Office 2016, I have to say the best part of the entire suite of apps has to be the collaboration offered. We at Absolute Geeks, found the easy sharing impressive and incredibly useful when sharing articles, editing and offering insight. The business intelligence features of Excel proved to be incredibly powerful, and the insights of Word were fantastic and heaven sent. However there’s no doubt that home users are missing out a lot; the Home edition feels rather lacking in features compared to the Work edition. Furthermore, many of the best features are gated behind the Work subscription offer such as Clutter and Groups for Outlook.
