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- Microsoft Office review: It’s all about collaboration
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Microsoft office 2016 reviews free. Five reasons Microsoft Office 2016 is better than Google Docs, and three reasons it isn't
The mobile, web, and Windows 10 Word Online apps share a common, consistent interface. The feature selection is very similar to that provided by Google's service, but the layout and interface are a slicker, albeit a little slower-loading.
Users invited to collaborate will be able to edit files online even if they don't have their own Office subscription. You get a range of text and page formatting options; it's easy to insert tables, images and symbols, and we're fans of Word Online's spelling checker and on-screen word count in a bar at the bottom of the page. It'll even show a count for a highlighted section of your document.
Simultaneous online editing isn't an entirely smooth and trouble-free experience however. We're not too keen on the way we had to manually move from view mode to edit mode when accessing a shared Word Online file. Saving and loading files from OneDrive using the desktop version of Word can be sluggish if your internet connection is slow. We also noticed that files open on the desktop occasionally lost sync with versions being edited online.
Even so, these are relatively minor issues with what's become an outstanding online word processor that now capably spans the gap between desktop, web and mobile.
Word is quite simply the best word processor on the market. It's also the first desktop word processor to allow collaborative editing of shared online documents, giving you all the features of the desktop with the syncing of purely web-based rivals such as Google Docs. Like most of Office , Outlook is little changed, which we appreciate, as sudden changes to your email client are rarely welcome.
However, there are a few new options, most of which are there to provide better integration with Office 's cloud-based sharing services. When you add file attachments from OneDrive or SharePoint to an email, you can choose whether recipients are allowed to only view them, or whether they can have edit permissions that'll allow them to collaborate online and change the shared document. If your business has moved its email to Microsoft's Office cloud, using either an OnMicrosoft domain or mapping your own domain to the service, then your users will have access to Outlook's Groups feature.
This makes it easy to create shared, fully archived message histories between groups of colleagues working on shared projects, for example. Even newly added group members will get complete access to the message archive, making it easy to bring them up to speed on the conversation. Groups can also easily share file and calendars, and extra administration tools are available from Office 's online admin centre. Other improvements that Office mail users get include extra inbox sorting in the form of the Clutter feature.
This allows you to categorise email that's low-priority but not entirely unwanted as "clutter". Outlook will learn from your decisions over time and automatically file messages in the clutter folder so you can look at them at your leisure, without them getting in the way of more important items. Excel is perhaps the component of Office that has the fewest rivals.
Although there are a number of fairly capable spreadsheet packages around, with Google Sheets making for a lightweight web-based alternative and LibreOffice Calc standing up to heavier use, none comes close to the sheer range of features that Excel provides. Excel's seen some of the most significant changes to any part of Office. Its standard functions and interface remain unchanged from Office , so even your most complicated spreadsheets and macros will continue working.
However, Excel has received some additions to its data importation and handling functions, which all ties in to Office 's more integrated, cloud connected update. The Data tab is now home to some functions previously only available through the Power Query add-in: you can now import data from a huge range of databases, both local and in the cloud. Other new features include a number of extra charting and data visualisation options, including waterfall charts for tracking changes to values over a time, box and whisker plots to show statistical variation, and sunburst charts to illustrate hierarchical data.
For users that handle profit and loss, marketing, or sales data on a regular basis, the data forecasting options have been refined. There's now a one-click Forecast button under the Data tab, and rather than a simple linear forecast, exponential smoothing features have been added to even out inconsistencies caused by one-time data spikes in the past. Pivot tables have seen some of their most significant updates since , with automatic relationship detection and time grouping, as well as in-table editing for advanced features such as custom measures.
Further incremental improvements include direct publishing to Microsoft's PowerBI visualisation platform, automatic rotation for inserted images, extra shape styles for charts and diagrams, touchscreen support with handwriting recognition for equations, and the same online integrations that the rest of Office has seen, with document sharing and built-in web searches.
However, there are a couple of improvements we were hoping for that haven't come with this release. For example, Excel still lacks a convenient method of exporting graphs and charts as high resolution images. Surprisingly, unlike Word and Google Sheets, two people can't work on the same spreadsheet in real time unless both are using the less-feature rich Excel Online to access it.
You can give others editing rights over your documents via Office , but if you keep your workbook open in Excel on the desktop, they won't be able to edit it. You can invite people to edit your Excel workbooks, but if you have it open in Excel, they won't be able to editing using Excel Online. The standard Professional edition of Office is rounded out by more specialist apps that have seen fewer changes than Word and Excel. Microsoft Publisher has no listed changes at all, and hasn't even acquired the otherwise universal 'Tell me what you want to do' box.
However, the simple layout and desktop publishing suite remains an underrated gem: it's very easy to use and allows anyone to quick put together simple newsletters, briefings and notices that require a little more formatting than Word is designed to handle. Microsoft Publisher doesn't get any new features at all but is still an underrated gem. PowerPoint 's most important upgrade is support for co-authoring, which means that you and a colleague can work on the same presentation together in real time, as long as it's saved to your OneDrive cloud storage.
Access might not be the most fashionable database development tool around, but Microsoft's been working hard to keep it relevant, with web app support and integration with SharePoint , although that product is currently in public beta. The latest version of Access also introduces new templates to make it easier to organise your data. There are template options for creating web-based apps as well as local databases, and both options include plenty of tutorials and video guides to help users who are new to database development.
It's inevitable that most businesses will be upgrading to Office sooner or later, with many likely to be planning an upgrade almost immediately.
The good news is that this latest version is great. Nothing's been broken and the new features add value, particularly for enterprises that use Office as a cornerstone of their software ecosystem. Extra support for sharing and collaborative working mean that Office now feels like software that works as part of cloud-based system, very much improving on the previously awkward experience of trying to work online with colleagues using a combination of Office and Office Mobile.
Unfortunately, it's not perfect when it comes working together online. You only get proper real-time collaboration and co-authoring in Word and PowerPoint. We really hoped that Excel would support full live co-authoring, too. While we can see that it might not be appropriate for multiple people to work on a very complex workbook together, we'd have appreciated the option for simultaneous desktop access to simpler files, such as shared lists and price indexes.
Alongside the big real-time editing addition, Office also includes a new version history side panel. Version history is now easy to access, and you can quickly restore an old version in seconds. It often feels like I use email every hour of every day, and nothing has really stemmed the flow of messages over the years. Microsoft has been tweaking Outlook to keep it modern over the years, but even in Office it still feels a little out of date.
Outlook is primarily aimed at Exchange ActiveSync compatible services like Outlook. Basically, Outlook is great for Exchange users and terrible for everybody else.
Thankfully, there are some interesting additions to Outlook that make email less daunting. Microsoft has added a clever way to manage attachments in Outlook. This is a trick that Google and Dropbox have both toyed with, but it feels more natural in Outlook. For Office shops, it saves precious storage space for recipients, but also makes it easier to use the sharing and collaboration features Microsoft has created. Microsoft is also adding an email organization tool called Clutter.
It prioritizes your email and clears low priority messages into a separate folder. Much like regular Skype, you can do voice or video calls and screen sharing in addition to the traditional Lync features like calendar scheduling.
Skype for Business has the ability to create group chats, but it feels like an add-on rather than a core feature. At The Verge we use Slack, and Microsoft has nothing in Office that comes close to matching either its simplicity or its usefulness. I found myself longing for the distraction of Slack when working on documents. One of the new apps to really embrace the idea of sharing and cloud-powered documents is Sway.
In its most basic form, Sway allows anyone to create a beautiful website from just images and text without any effort. You can insert pictures, videos, tweets, and charts so there are plenty of options. Most of the changes are minor compared to what we got in Office three years ago.
Instead, there are separate Windows 10 "mobile" apps that are designed for tablets and phones. If you just look at the relatively sparse upgrades to the desktop apps, it hardly seems worth the upgrade. But if you consider that a subscription to Office puts you on a permanent upgrade track and lets you use Office on basically any device you can think of, the calculus gets much more interesting. The real value comes with the other apps that are available to you with an Office subscription.
These same apps are nearly identical to the ones found on Android tablets and the iPad. Anything more and you can pick up the desktop apps on Windows and Mac as part of Office What Office really represents is the future of how Microsoft will deliver software.
Much like Windows 10, Office is moving to an era where there are minor improvements on a regular basis, with a focus on sharing and cloud features. By focusing less on improving the already full featured desktop Office apps for , it feels like Microsoft has spent most of its time making sure Office works well everywhere you want to use it.
For the past 20 years, Office has been ubiquitous. But in that time, the web and mobile devices from Apple and Android have also become ubiquitous.
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