Microsoft Launches Office 2016 for Mac Preview [Download]

Microsoft today announced a preview of Office 2016 for Mac that is officially available to download and try. Office 2016 for Mac is powered by the cloud so you can access your documents on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint at anytime, anywhere and on any device.

Similar to our recent announcements of universal Office apps for Windows 10 and Office for Android tablet, Office 2016 for Mac shares an unmistakably Office experience–but it is also thoughtfully designed to take advantage of the unique features of the Mac. The new apps offer full retina display support with thousands of retina-optimized graphics, full screen view for native immersive experiences, and even little Mac affordances like scroll bounce.




The new Office 2016 for Mac includes updated versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. The user experience has been modernized with a redesigned ribbon, a refreshed task pane interface, and new themes and styles.

Here's a look at what's new:

Word
Word’s state of the art editing, reviewing and sharing tools make authoring and polishing documents easy. The design tab allows you to manage layout, colors and fonts across a document, and the navigation pane helps you refine the document structure and efficiently navigate to points of interest. Threaded comments turn editing cycles into conversations, so you spend less time trying to connect the dots.


Excel
With the new features in Excel, you’ll be telling your data’s story in no time. Charts, graphs, keyboard shortcuts and data entry enhancements (like formula builder and autocomplete) immediately make you more productive. And support for Excel 2013 (for Windows) functions ensures that you can easily share files across platforms. The new Analysis ToolPak offers a wide range of statistical functions, including moving averages and exponential smoothing, and PivotTable Slicers help you cut through large volumes of data to find patterns that answer questions.



PowerPoint
Walk into your next presentation with complete confidence. PowerPoint’s new Presenter View is like mission control for your presentation–displaying the current slide, the next slide, notes and a timer on your Mac, while projecting only the presentation to your audience on the big screen. A new animation pane helps you build your presentation faster, and new slide transitions ensures the finished product is polished and professional.


Outlook
Managing your email has never been easier. The recently released Outlook for Mac is also a part of the preview suite and uses push mail support to deliver an always-up-to-date inbox. The improved conversation view automatically organizes your inbox around threaded conversations, so you’ll never hunt for related messages again. And the new message preview gives you the first sentence of an email just below the subject line so you can quickly decide if you want to read it now or come back later.


OneNote
Never forget again with OneNote. Capture, organize and share your ideas with digital notebooks that you can access on any device. Use tags like “To Do” or “Important” or “Question” to add structure to your notes, and find things quickly with a powerful search engine that tracks your tags, indexes your typed notes and uses OCR to recognize text in images and handwritten notes.

You can download the preview by clicking here. Microsoft says it will use the feedback to finalize the product for release later this summer.