Office 2016 Review

At IndiaTrainigServices.in we got a good look at the US editions of the Office 2016 Developer edition.
Office 2016 is a major upgrade, but not in the way you’d first suppose. Just as Windows 10 ties notebooks, desktops, phones and tablets together, and adds a layer of intelligence, Office 2016 wants to connect you and your coworkers together, using some baked-in smarts to help you along.
We have tested the client-facing portion of Office 2016. Microsoft released the trial version of Office 2016 in March as a developer preview with a focus on administrative features (data loss protection, multi-factor authentication and more) that we didn’t test.

Office 2013 users can rest easy about one thing: Office 2016’s applications are almost indistinguishable from their previous versions in look and feature set. To the basic Office apps, Microsoft has added its Sway app for light content creation, and the enterprise information aggregator, Delve. 

Collaboration in the cloud is the real difference with Office 2016. Office now encourages you to share documents online, in a collaborative workspace. Printing out a document and marking it up with a pen? Medieval. Even emailing copies back and forth is now tacitly discouraged.
Microsoft says its new collaborative workflow reflects how people do things now, from study groups to community centers on up to enterprise sales forces. But Microsoft’s brave new world runs best on Office 365, Microsoft’s subscription service, where everybody has the latest software that automatically updates over time. And to use all of the advanced features of Office, you must own some sort of Windows PC.

You could still buy Office 2016 as a standalone product: It costs Rs. 6,000 for Office 2016 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote ) and Rs. 18,500 for Office Home & Business, which adds Outlook 2016. Office 365 is Rs. 330 per month for a Personal plan (with one device installation) and Rs. 450 per month for a Home Plan, where Office can be installed on five devices and five phones.

If you subscribe to Office 365, it’s a moot point; those bits will stream down to your PC shortly. Windows 10 users already have access to Microsoft’s own baked-in, totally free version of Office, the Office Mobile apps. It’s those people who fall somewhere in the middle—unwilling to commit to Office 365, but still wavering whether or not to buy Office—who must decide.

Our advice to an individual, family, or small business owner: Wait. If you’ve never owned Office, the free Office Mobile apps that can be downloaded from the Windows Store onto iOS, Android, and Windows Phones are very good—and include some of the intelligence and sharing capabilities built into Office 2016. Microsoft’s Office Web apps do the same.

There’s no question that Office 2016 tops Google Apps, and I haven’t seen anything from the free, alternative office suites that should compel you to look elsewhere. But Microsoft still struggles to answer the most basic question: Why should I upgrade? That’s a question that I think Microsoft could answer easily—and I’ll tell you how it can, at the end.

Before that, here’s what works, and what doesn’t, in Office 2016. With PowerPoint, however, most of that goes out the window. You can ask coworkers to collaborate, and you can still send them links by which they can edit your shared presentations. You can still comment, and coworkers can still make changes to the text as they wish. But you can’t really manage their changes, or restrict what they can or can’t do. (You can compare and reconcile versions of the same document that a coworker has worked upon separately, however, which is vaguely similar.)

But—and this is a big but—any revisions to a document show up only if you click a teeny-tiny Save icon, way down at the bottom of the screen, that serves as a sort of CB-radio-style ‘Over’ command. It’s almost impossible to find unless you know what you’re looking for. Click it, and changes made by others show up. When your colleague makes another change, you have to click it again. It’s a pain.
Granted, collaborative editing wasn’t in the Office 2016 preview Microsoft released earlier this year. And, given that there’s an enormous blank space in the ribbon header to the right half of the screen, you have to imagine that more managed sharing is heading to PowerPoint.