Published on: 7/29/2015IST

We take an in-depth look at Office 2016 for Windows, Mac and touch devices

 

 

(Note that this is our take on the preview of Office 2016. Although this is unfinished goods, it is likely that the final version won't be dramatically different from the one we reviewed)

Microsoft is the productivity company, claims CEO Satya Nadella. While that includes a range of products from the Office 365 cloud services to the mobile apps for iOS and Android (along with Skype for Business, Dynamics and Power BI), for most people, Microsoft Office is "top-of-the-mind" for productivity software.

 

That said, between Google Docs, Apple's Numbers and Pages, Libre Office and even Box's Office viewers, Microsoft Office has plenty of competition. With Office 2016, Microsoft needed to update its core tools, build on cloud services like OneDrive and Office 365, and deliver tools for tablets that might never have a keyboard connected.

Redmond must also bring its new cross-platform strategy to OS X users who care more about the fact that Office on the Mac went for almost five years without a significant update, than the fact that Word and Excel actually started out on the Mac (before Windows), decades ago.

What we're actually getting with Office 2016 isn't the same Office everywhere. It's more like the right Office for each of the three platforms explored today.

• Windows still getting the lion's share of tools and features simply because it's had the most attention over the years. In the preview, the most important new features (beyond interface updates) are for business intelligence in Excel – and for information protection and Office 365 admin.
• Office 2016 for Mac has been launched with many new features that has the feel of a real Mac application and the tools of a real version of Office, and even when it is, it won't have all the Office applications and it won't get all the Windows Office features.
• The touch version of Office, otherwise known as Office for Windows 10, sits somewhere between Office for iPad and the Windows RT version of Office for Home and Student, but brings in features from Office Online.

Microsoft is trying to make sense of the core Office tools across multiple platforms. So what will Office 2016 do for your productivity? In this article, we'll take a look at Office 2016 for Windows, Office for Windows 10 (the equivalent of Office for iPad on Windows 10 phones and tablets) and the long awaited Office 2016 for Mac.

 

Office 2016

At this point, the question for Office on Windows isn't so much how much more can you do with it, as how can you be more efficient/productive with what you have? That's the direction we're seeing Office 2016 go towards, for administrators as well as users.

There are some excellent new features in individual apps and some welcome improvements across the suite on the interface front, as well as new security and management options. But this is also a very familiar territory, to the point that we haven't yet found any new features that are specific to Word or PowerPoint 2016.

 

It has the same simple click-to-run install that streams the Office code and lets you start using Office before the installation finishes (the little video you watch actually plays in PowerPoint). If the feature you want hasn't downloaded, the application will let you know – and prioritise installing that code next so you can use it.

The universal look

Microsoft is calling Office 2016 more colourful; we'd call it slightly chunkier as well. In fact the interface now gives you a choice of five Office Themes rather than the three in Office 2013. You can still have a white or light grey header and background on each window, and only see the accent colour for each program in the status bar and the 'backstage' menu that opens when you click the File tab on the ribbon.

The new medium grey theme is a similar high contrast theme to the dark grey theme in Office 2013, with a darker grey background and black backstage menu – the Office 2016 dark grey theme really is dark grey, so that icons and commands have even higher contrasts. Some people prefer the look but again it's there as an accessibility option for those with visual problems.

 

The new Colourful theme picks up the solid slabs of colour in Windows 10, painting them across the title bar and the tab bar on the ribbon to ensure you can't miss that the window which is blue at the top is a Word document, and the window that's green at the top is your spreadsheet.

That's more useful on Windows 10 where icons on the taskbar have been shrunk down to make room for the ever-present Cortana search bar and open icons are highlighted only by a barely visible line underneath – so you might need a thick slice of colour to spot them.

Office 2016 picks up another Windows 10 styling – the title and ribbon tab bars in Office used to be smaller than the title and ribbon tab bars in Windows tools like Explorer. Now they're the same height, which means you lose a little more of your screen to the interface rather than keeping it for your document – even with the ribbon collapsed.

That's particularly noticeable in Windows 10, where there is a large vertical gap between the title bar and the ribbon tab bar to fit in the new Tell Me tool. This may be an artefact of the Windows 10 preview builds, or it may be that this chunky new style is Microsoft's fresh design direction.

Tell Me is a feature Office Online users will recognise (it's also in Office 2016 for Mac, but it works slightly differently there). Despite the ribbon, there are still plenty of tools hidden away in dialog boxes – and even the tools on the ribbon may not be where you expect.

It gives you a search box where you can type what you want to do (line spacing, print, and so on) and get a mini menu of tools that match what you're asking for. If the tool you want is in the list, you can click on it to use the feature.

There are some useful improvements to the backstage menu (below). On the Info pane, you see more of the details about your file without having to click again to see all details, like the times when you created, last changed and last printed the file – they used to be hidden away.

For files you save to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business, the list of recent files in each application is also more useful. It still roams between the devices where you sign in with the same Microsoft account (even if that's not the account you bought Office with) so you can pick up where you left off on another PC very quickly.

And it's now grouped and labelled – any files you've pinned so they're always there are in the Pinned group and the others are grouped under Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week and Older, which can speed up finding what you need. Plus each document is also marked with the file location, which can be another clue for picking between two similar file names.

This is all extremely useful and make it even more annoying that recent and pinned files still don't make it to the jump lists for the Office application in the Windows taskbar. It's also frustrating that not all of your Office settings roam yet – your custom dictionary does, but your spell checking settings (like whether to ignore words with numbers in), your AutoCorrect dictionary and your Outlook email signatures don't, for example.

Equally annoyingly, Windows users don't get the same level of OneDrive integration as seen in Office for Mac 2016, where you can see files and folders that have been shared with you in the list of OneDrive files and folders. That means when someone shares a file you won't know unless they send you a mail or you go to OneDrive on the web and look (and even if they mail you, you have to go back and find the message when you want to work on the file).

You only see shared files you've already opened in the list; useful for carrying on with work, not useful for getting started on a project. One thing Microsoft might learn from cloud-first solutions like Google Apps.

You might get more links from colleagues now that the Share pane includes the option to send a link as well as sending an attachment or inviting them to collaborate on OneDrive. Inviting someone emails the link, and receiving the link displays a URL you can copy or you can share directly to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn – and each time you can use a link that lets people view the document or join in and edit it too.

As with Office 2013, multiple people can edit a shared document. There are no changes to how this works in Office 2016, but we found that Word continued to show that someone else was editing a document they'd been working on in Word 2016 up to 30 minutes after they'd actually closed it.

One interface change will be useful for documents you're opening from the cloud – if you open a file with large charts or SmartArt diagrams, you usually have to wait for the whole thing to load. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2016, if you're opening a document on a slow network, you get a placeholder so you can work with the rest of the document while the objects load (they're the correct size so the document won't reflow when the download finishes, you just can't edit them). The download progress bar in the status bar lets you know more clearly how long you'll be waiting for the rest of your document, which is also helpful.

 

Management and security

 

The Office 2016 preview is currently only available to Office 365 users, and only for the Pro Plus plans (because those include the licences for all the applications and features), but so far not all of the management features coming in this release are enabled.

Admins get more customisation options for the Click-to-Run setup (you still use the Office deployment tools to work with this) and Microsoft says there are general bug fixes and security updates in the installer. You'll be able choose how often you get bug fixes and new features without blocking security updates and you can use System Center Configuration Manager to manage monthly Office updates.

The Office 2016 applications work with the same Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based single sign-in for multi-factor authentication that you can currently use in preview with Office 2013 Windows clients, so users don't see as many Office 365 sign-in screens, and that multi-factor authentication now works for Outlook as well.

The preview also includes an updated version of the Office 2013 Telemetry Dashboard, an Excel workbook for looking at the information the telemetry agent in the Office applications collects about how users in the domain use documents – so you can see if key documents like spreadsheets are crashing often with the preview.

On Windows, Office has had the option of limiting what people can do with the documents you share with them, and even the emails you send, for years. As long as you have Rights Management Services (RMS) on Windows Server or the new Azure Rights Management Service, you can turn on Information Rights Management (IRM) and choose whether a document can be copied, printed, forwarded or not, and stop it being opened after an expiry date you choose. You can also read protected documents directly in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and (new in 2016) Visio in the business versions of Office on Windows, without needing a separate app.

This is a feature that is getting more interesting now that people can also open those documents on iPhones, iPads, Macs and, soon, Android devices and read IRM-protected email in Outlook for Mac (again, that's coming to iOS and Android versions of Outlook soon) as well as Outlook Web Access and the free RMS apps.

Office 2016 also extends the Outlook Data Loss Prevention features right into Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Previously, if you tried to email out information that might be confidential or against regulations, you'd see a mail tip in Outlook – if your administrators had turned on DLP rules in Exchange like not letting you send credit card numbers. Now you'll see a warning right inside the app, say if you try to save a document with information you're not supposed to share in the wrong location.

As with the Outlook mail tips, you get a warning at the top of your document saying that you shouldn't be doing that, but you also have the option of doing it anyway and providing a reason why you need to. Microsoft calls this the 'break the glass' option; you can get out in an emergency, but you set off an alarm by doing it – because your manager will get a message that you're bypassing the rules along with your explanation, and they can choose whether the message gets sent.

That lets you set up rules to protect data but gives people a say in when they're applied, because information security is really a management rather than a technology issue. After all, if you really want to pass on information you're not supposed to, you can pull out a phone and take pictures of your screen to share; you just can't pretend that you didn't know you were doing anything wrong.

Outlook

Outlook has some other great new features, especially the new list of recent files that pops up when you click to add an attachment. After all, the file you're most likely to want to send to someone is probably the one you've just been working on.

If you have a touchscreen device, you don't just see that list of recent files in the ribbon when you choose Attach File – you can also get at it from the now context-sensitive action bar at the side of the screen. Instead of greying out the tools that you can't use when you're replying to a message, the new action bar replaces them with common options – attaching a file, popping out or discarding the message, or setting it as 'important'.

That's a good move in terms of the responsive design that fits Outlook into smaller windows better – instead of shrinking down all the panes you have displayed so you can't really see any of them, Outlook now shows you just the inbox list or just the message pane, depending on what you have selected. That will work well on smaller tablets.

The drop-down menu for handling attachments is useful on smaller screens and touch systems. Instead of having to right click to do anything except preview an attachment, you now get a drop-down menu that lets you open, print, save or copy the file – even when you're previewing it.

Also useful on smaller tablets is the option to save less of your inbox on the device. In Outlook 2013, the default is to download the last month's worth of email and you can't choose anything less than that. In Outlook 2016, you can keep two weeks, one week, three days or even just one day of messages to save space. The slightly faster search of mail you're keeping on Exchange comes in useful if you do that, as does the better performance on slow networks (Outlook should freeze less while it's trying to stay connected to the server on a poor network connection).

Excel

The improved business intelligence tools are the main focus in Excel 2016. Power Query is now a built-in Excel feature rather than an add-on, and if you use any of the Power View, Power Pivot and Power Map features, they all turn on ready to use, and Power View now works with data from OLAP cubes. When you're adding fields to Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts you can now search for the field you want rather than having to scroll through the list, which should save time.

For speed, you can also open large spreadsheets from SharePoint or OneDrive for Business as read only (although we had problems with OneDrive for Business crashing Excel).

Working with the slicers that let you quickly filter tables and Pivot Tables using a touchscreen gets easier in Excel 2016. In Excel 2013 you could only select one item in a slicer using touch – now you can press and hold to get a control that switches you into multi-select mode, although it would be easier if you could just tap on multiple items to select them one after another.

There are new features for data model Pivot Tables – which use the Velocity engine and will eventually replace the older Pivot Tables in Excel. You can now group them by time, and there's a handy tool to automatically build relationships between the tables you add to your data model for the Pivot Table without you having to do it by hand.

Not all of the promised improvements are ready yet. You're supposed to be able to rename tables, columns or measures in Power Pivot (which opens in a separate window with its own tools) and have those names show up automatically in your PivotTables, although we got warnings to rename columns in Excel instead.

The spreadsheet comparison tool is still included with Excel 2016 to help you quickly track changes to cells and sheets in your workbooks – but it's still a separate app instead of a feature inside Excel, and it still looks like it belongs in Windows XP or Vista instead of a current version of Office. Like the powerful but confusing array of business intelligence tools in Excel, this is the scattergun approach of adding in tools that are hugely useful but don't all fit neatly together.

Fewer changes

Other Office applications have fewer changes. Apart from the new Office themes, OneNote looks identical to the 2013 release – as does Access, and neither have the Tell Me bar for finding commands. Project gets a new timeline view that shows multiple timeline bars together; you can also show just specific phases of a project in the timeline bar by picking the date range. Visio comes with a set of starter diagrams that show you how to work with specific templates, with some handy tips for using Visio itself. The keyboard shortcuts for the shape panel in Visio will speed things up for more experienced users.

Skype for Business

Microsoft is in the middle of changing the name of its Lync communications software – what you get in the Office preview is called Lync on the Start menu and Skype for Business when you launch it. It has the features of Lync in a more Skype-like UI, which works well.

You get Skype's floating call monitor so you can work in other apps during a call and be able to mute or hang up the call without going back to the main window. And you can easily add both Skype and Lync contacts, as long as your admin has enabled Lync and Skype federation. At the moment you don't see user icons for Skype contacts, but you can add them to standard Lync groups like Friends and Family. We had difficulty joining scheduled meetings with the preview client, but it worked flawlessly for calls to and from Skype.

OneDrive for Business

Microsoft is hard at work merging OneDrive and OneDrive for Business into a single system with a single sync engine, but the preview of OneDrive for Business that you get with Office 2016 – which is more like the OneDrive client in Windows – is still a different beast with a different interface.

You can pick what it syncs from your PC to the SharePoint site where OneDrive for Business lives, but instead of a helpful interface to do that, the interface tells you to 'paste in your library' without telling you what that means or how to find the information. For browsing and saving files already in your OneDrive for Business, the improved backstage menu works well – as long as OneDrive for Business doesn't crash, which it did repeatedly on our test PCs.

Clearly, Microsoft is still ironing out bugs in OneDrive for Business as it rewrites it. Eventually it should be a friendly way for users to save files in the cloud and share them securely, but it's not there yet.

Early verdict

When software is as powerful, as mature and as complex as Office is on Windows, making it easier to use can be as important as adding more features. That's the trade-off Microsoft has been making with Office since the ribbon interface was first introduced.

So far, apart from the improved BI tools in Excel and the security and management enhancements, the interface changes are the most significant updates in Office 2016. That includes the way Outlook lets you get straight to recent files when you need to attach them to an email, which is a tiny feature that's enormously useful. It's disappointing that Windows users don't get the superb OneDrive integration that's on the Mac preview, where you can finally see files that have been shared with you by other people – saving a huge amount of time when you're collaborating.

As with the Mac and touch versions of Office 2016, this is very much still a preview. We didn't find any missing features and we saw very few performance and stability issues, but we did have at least one crash in Word on two different test machines, and sending long documents to OneNote was slower and more likely to cause the software to hang than in Office 2013. Scrolling or saving a long document in Word often made the cursor jump to another part of the document.

We haven't seen the final feature list for Office 2016, but because the way people pay for Office is changing it may not need to be as impressive as in previous releases. More and more Office users are buying an Office 365 subscription that will get them Office 2016 without them paying anything extra, so even a relatively modest update will get adopted quickly. As usual, remember that some business features will only make it into the business SKUs of Office – in particular the information security and BI tools.

 

7/29/2015 | | Permalink