Mac users of Office who have felt left out in the cold by Microsoft (because the last version, Office 2011 for Mac, was released in October 2010) now have reason to be pleased: The final version of Office 2016 for Mac brings the suite out of the dark ages and into the modern world. Hints of what the new Office would offer have been out for quite a while, notably the preview of Outlook, introduced in October 2014. But Mac owners had to wait until early July for the final release of the full suite, including the core applications Word, PowerPoint and Excel. It was well worth the wait. Office 2016 for Mac sports a far better interface than Office 2011, integrates well with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and dramatically improves Outlook. (Note: Mac for Office 2016 requires Yosemite OS X or better. It’s currently only available as part of a subscription to Office 365, which allows you to install Office on multiple devices. It will sell as a standalone Mac product later this month.) Spanking new interface The moment you run any Office application, you know you've left the aging Office 2011 behind. It's less cluttered, cleaner and sleeker-looking, more logically organized, more colorful and simpler to use. That's largely in part because the Ribbon has been redone, and now looks and works as it does in the Windows version of Office. The Ribbon is far more prominent and now sits close to the top of the screen rather than (as before) beneath a long row of icons for doing things such as opening and closing files, printing and so on. The usual Mac menu that sits atop Mac applications is hidden as well, although you can reveal it by moving your cursor to the top of the screen. It's a clever way to bridge the worlds of Office and Mac OS X. Not everyone is a Ribbon fan, though, and those who wish it were gone, or just want to give themselves a little more screen real estate, can hide it by clicking a small up arrow at the Ribbon's far right. The Ribbon goes away and the arrow turns to face downwards. Click the arrow to make the Ribbon come back. Not only has the Ribbon been moved but it's been reorganized, which is all to the good. For example, Word's confusing Document Elements tab is gone; most of what was there can now be found in the more logically-named Insert tab. So now, you use the Insert tab when you want to insert anything, whether it be art, a table, header, link and so on. In Office 2011 you had to go on a treasure hunt through many different tabs to find all that. You'll find similar reorganizations throughout all of Office. Integration with OneDrive Microsoft has been integrating its cloud-based service OneDrive into both Windows and Office, and so, as you would expect, access to OneDrive is built right into Office 16 for the Mac. You have a choice of opening or saving files either to the cloud-based OneDrive or on your Mac's hard disk. It took me a little while to get used to the somewhat confusing OneDrive interface. When you choose File / Open or press Command-O, you see a screen that is clearly designed to be like every other Office screen, with the same colors, size of icons and so on. You then have the choice of opening a file on OneDrive or on your local Mac. If you choose to open a OneDrive file, you get the same Office-like interface. However, if you choose a Mac-based file, you’re switched to the Mac’s Finder interface and have to use it navigate to files stored on your local version of OneDrive. Using two different interfaces to open files is jarring at first and takes getting used to. However, after a few times I got used to dealing with it. You likely will as well. Word 2016 As with the other Office applications, the main thing that's new about Word is the interface. But there are other changes as well. There is now a somewhat awkward collaboration feature that lets two people work simultaneously in the same document. In theory it sounds nice; in practice, I wasn't impressed. You don't see the changes your collaborator makes until she saves the document, and she won't see your changes until you save it. That's not exactly real-time collaboration. Nice try, but I won't be using the feature any time soon -- Google Docs is far superior in this area, because it uses true real-time collaboration. Word and the other Office applications get the full-blown ribbon treatment in Office 16 for Mac. On the plus side, there's a new Styles pane that lets you apply pre-set styles to text and paragraphs. It's easy to overlook, because it's available only on the Home tab. To use it, go to the Home tab and click the Styles Pane icon on the upper right of the screen -- and the pane appears. Click the icon again to make it go away. Word 2016 also adds another useful new pane, the Navigation pane, which lets you navigate through a document via search results, headings and page thumbnails. You can also navigate by the kinds of changes you've made to the document, such as comments and formatting. Excel 2016 One of the most welcome additions to Excel is that it now recognizes most Windows keyboard shortcuts. But don't worry -- there's no need to abandon the old Mac Excel shortcuts, because it recognizes them as well. Being a long-time Windows Excel user, I found this saved me a great deal of time on the Mac. It was like coming home. Excel now comes with new data analysis and charting features. Spreadsheet jockeys will be pleased that Excel has been powered with many of the features from the Windows version, such as adding slicers to pivot tables. With slicers, you create buttons that make it easy to filter data in a pivot table report, with no need to resort to drop-down lists. A number of new statistical functions have also been added, such as moving averages and exponential smoothing. Less importantly, when you click on a cell, your cursor essentially glides over to it in an animated way, like it does on the Windows 2013 version of Excel. Will this change your life? Far from it. But I found it just the slightest bit entertaining, and I, for one, can use all the entertainment I can get when I'm using a spreadsheet. Not everything is rosy in this new version of Excel, though. You can't build pivot charts in Excel, which is unfortunate, because they're a great way to present complex information at a glance, and are useful when creating dashboards meant to display a great deal of data at once. PowerPoint 2016 PowerPoint has gotten the same kind of collaboration features as Word and suffers from the same limitation --- it's not true real-time collaboration because changes don't show up until the person you're collaborating with saves them. The new Presenter view may be PowerPoint's best new feature. On the plus side, I found the new Presenter view an excellent addition. With it, while you're projecting a presentation, your audience will see the current slide, while you'll also see your notes, the next slide and a timer. That makes it easy to read from your notes and know what's coming next when giving your presentation. A new animations pane is useful for creating and previewing animations in your presentations. I found it exceptionally useful because it let me control pretty much everything about animations in slides, including customizing the duration of the animation, whether to play sound along with it, and a number of effects options. And it's also great for adding multiple animations to a slide, because you can use the pane to easily change the order of the animations, delete animations and add news ones. Outlook 2016 If you feel that Apple Mail is purgatory, Outlook 2016 will be a must-have. As with the other applications in Office 2016, Outlook has gotten a visual makeover to make it look and work more like its Windows counterpart. Clutter has been reduced, although it still relies on a menu above the ribbon for many tasks. Outlook has a new look, but more important may be performance enhancements under the hood. Click Here to Download Office 2016 For Mac Please Kindly comment and subscribe to my Youtube channel.