“After a five-year gap, Microsoft has unveiled the first public beta of its forthcoming Office 2016 for Mac with the release of Microsoft Office for Mac 2016 Preview,” Nick Peers writes for BetaNews. “The new release is free for all Yosemite users during the remainder of the product’s pre-release phase, with the final version slated for release later this year.”
“Office for Mac 2016 Preview ships with five components: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote,” Peers writes. “The current preview version will function for 60 days, and can be installed alongside Office for Mac 2011 — users will need to keep updating to newer preview builds to extend this deadline.”
Peers writes, “Once Office for Mac 2016 is officially released — “later this summer” was the vague date provided on the Office blog — then the preview will expire within one month. Pricing for Office for Mac 2016 has yet to be confirmed, but it will be available as a free update to all Mac users with a valid Office 365 subscription.”
Read more in the full article here.
“Office for Mac, while still a beta, doesn’t feel near as sluggish as previous versions. It almost feels lightweight,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “But it’s also clear Microsoft is running out of ideas, since there aren’t a whole lot of new features to consider.”
“If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, or you’re on a long-term Office contract, it won’t matter. You’ll get the new version free of charge,” Steinberg writes. “But those have to pay an upgrade fee after the public beta process is over should think twice whether it’s really worth it, and that is the biggest problem with Microsoft’s curious upgrade priorities that seem to favor form over substance.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll pass. Let’s just let Microsoft die, okay?
They should just make it free already.
They can’t. This is how Microsoft makes money. And that’s precisely Microsoft’s BIG problem. Apple can give software to its hardware customers; Apple software is a value-added service. Google can do “other things” to profit while making its software and services free. Microsoft must sell its software, in a world where the expectation is now, “They should just make it free already.”
Why should they? Good software is worth paying for, and Office remains the most powerful suite on the market.
My first and biggest disappointment is that MS has abandoned software sales and, like Adobe and others, will henceforth only rent you their software.
Google and Apple and other imitators can attempt to pay you to take their office software for all I care, but we can all see how that works out. All of the freebie wares are of lesser quality and functionality. If a neutered free version of iWork is good enough for you, fine, enjoy it. Some of us need more power, and nobody delivers spreadsheet and word processing software with the abilities that Excel and Word do. Period.
That isn’t going to change anytime soon since Apple seems more determined than ever to abandon professionals and tie its consumer-grade users to a subscription-based cloud. I would be much more impressed with Apple if it charged a fair price for professional-level desktop Mac software. But no, all Timmy cares about is getting the kids hooked into cloud payments.
There are some good alternatives to the different pieces of Microsoft Office. But there is still not a great alternative to the entire suite of Microsoft applications including their tie-ins with Outlook. If a company like Apple were committed to dethroning Microsoft then, in my opinion, it would be possible to do so.
There is nothing magic about Microsoft Office. It remains a bloated and somewhat inconsistent set of software components developed or purchased from multiple sources and glued together into the Office suite. To this day, no one can explain why tables in Word are different from tables in Excel. Word should use Excel code for embedded tables. And why can’t you vertically center content in the cells of Word tables?
Office’s primary strength is the fact that it is widely used in business. Microsoft also continues to ensure that Office does not function *quite* right on the Mac – little inconsistencies and issues here and there that render the Mac a second-tier citizen. SharePoint is the same.
If Apple really wants to take a bite out of Microsoft’s enterprise sales, the Apple needs to get serious about a Microsoft Office alternative and associated applications like Outlook and SharePoint.
Fact is, for many of us, we still need to deal with MS Office because we interact with others who use it. More complex files tend to lose their formatting when switched between apps; and new and better designed software is always welcome. Seriously, MDN’s childish ad hominem attacks far too frequently undermine the credibility of any valid points they venture to make. Shame.
The reason is that some of the powerful features, there simply isn’t competition. Time is money and powerful features like pivot charts and pivot tables save oodles of time when used properly.
By extension, most of these features are overkill for the 90%.
Yeah, lots of ignorant people out there. Office is still the core of corporate tools and nothing will change that soon. But it will not stay that way unless Microsoft gives Windows with Office 365 for the same price. A simple one stop solution is all they have left to offer. If they F that up, its over.
There are plenty of alternatives to MS Office. You lack credibility when you make statements like yours. Make an effort.
“plenty of alternatives to MS Office”
Sure, always have been. Switching to the those alternatives is difficult and costly, as those alternatives require training. Plus, alternatives have compatibility issues and lack all of the same features.
I think MS is on to something with Office 365. It’s actually a pretty good deal for small businesses who want corporate features without having to run a corporate like network.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, they still have value. If they threw in Windows with Office 365 for the same price with the exact same version of Office for PC and Mac, that would be awesome.
Pass! iWork, OpenOffice and others do just fine.
OpenOffice is not an option, an antiquated POS. But anything from Microsoft is a virus.
Try LibreOffice instead, which I use. There’s still NeoOffice as well, which is significantly Mac-ified.
I normally use Office when I have to. That means at work usually.
This year I started using OneNote and I was actually surprised at how nice the Mac version of the software was.
The beta apps of Office are definitely similar to OneNote, and they feel like a lot of care has been put into them. I agree with the article that there’s none of that bloated feeling so far (let’s see how long that lasts).
But I’m sure of one thing: the Mac version of Office feels way nicer to use compared to Office 2013. 2013 is truly awful, looks overly cartoony, and literally hurts my eyes.
Whenever someone gives me a Word doc I just copy and paste the contents into a real program (usually Creative Suite). If they need a Word doc back then I save a PDF from a real program and have Acrobat make me a full-formatted Word doc.
Whenever someone gives me a PowerPoint doc, I open it, export a PDF and get the hell out.
Now Excel I spend hours and hours in and neither Numbers nor Google Spreadsheet come close to Excel in ease-of-use or functionality. From the article “PivotTable Slicer, which is designed to pick out patterns from large volumes of data” sounds like an extremely useful function.
Taking into account what you say about excel, you should understand that others have similar needs involving Word and Powerpoint
I can only relate my own experience.
Have been M$ Office since 2001. Neo Office works fine for me. 😀
Another POS. It’s pretty bad when MS Office is actually preferable to use than… anything.
M$ products are FUBAR (F[oul]ed Up Beyond All Repair). 😀
LibreOffice, OpenOffice and NeoOffice are all free. (Well, NeoOffice does demand a ‘donation’). Go pay for the finished version of MS Office 2016 if you prefer. I’ve lived without M$ for years and have done some very nice work in LibreOffice, my preferred freebie. THAT is worth a donation.
I’m looking forward to the new version of MS Office for the Mac. Since Apple destroyed iWork and raped Pages of its most salient features, I’ve returned to MS Office for the Mac. I’d rather pay for a full featured and functional office suite than work with a free, stripped down, nearly non-functional suite that masquerades as a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program. Even MDN has registered complaints about iWork, so the MDN Take seems misplaced if not misguided.
I use paper and pencil!
I just blog. All the world’s a page, and all the men and women merely bloggers.
They just reskinned it to make it look more like windows 8.
For those of us who don’t give a rat’s:
http://www.libreoffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org
😾 🐭
Newsflash:
MS preparing beta of Office for Apple Watch.
Who cares?
I have Office. I use it. I get a lot of documents in office formats. I’ve tried lots of different replacements and imports are rarely 100% unless what I’m translating is rather simple.
However… if Office 2016 really is subscription only, I’ll pass.
I don’t do (and likely never will do) subscription software. With subscription software all they have to do is change the file format and you’re stuck — it’s no longer backward compatible to your perpetual license software. Keep paying the subscription or give up on accessing that file in native format.
MS will offer a stand alone version of Office 2016. What a pity that Apple destroyed iWork by dummying it down, stripping its great features, perverting its interface, and gutting its ease of use. None-the-less, MS Office remains the de facto suite for business and most educational institutions.
If one simply needs to put text on a page, there are many good alternatives to Word. But more complex formatting needs (table of contents creation, footnotes, numbering and bullets) and compatibility with others who use Word require the use of Word. Trying to use other solutions seriously cuts into productivity.
But like you, I’m not keen on subscription models. I paid once for Office for Mac 2011. It works fine. If I don’t like the 2016 version, I can keep using 2011.
Don’t waste your time. Go get LibreOffice instead!
I downloaded the new version to play around with it. So far, I don’t see anything really awesome. It’s been almost five years since the last Office for Mac update. During that time, Microsoft helped prove that we don’t need their bloatware anymore. I do all of my document creation using Pages and Numbers. Why would I need Microsoft Office?
I need Microsoft Visio for Mac, and I can’t find any good alternative for it.
Flood their feedback with complaints on non-standard user interface, non standard and missing keyboard shortcuts, non-standard file open dialog boxes (by always showing this idiotic MS dashboard), non standard placement of menu items (Outlook), no iCloud support and whatnot have you.