Review by Busy Executive

If you’re engaged in just about any sort of business today, it’s difficult not to have Microsoft office. Sooner or later, a colleague will send you a spreadsheet with some sort of custom macro that only works in Excel, or a presentation that only seems to render properly in authentic PowerPoint. Even if you’re a diehard Mac user with all sorts of sophisticated alternate apps on your Mac, sooner or later you’ll wish you had Microsoft Office.

The good news is that Microsoft has made it really easy to get Office, and to share both the apps and your documents across a wide range of devices, not just your Mac. On my iPad, for example, I use Office 365…gone are the days of saving presentations as PDFs so that I can display them from my iPad since the built-in PPT viewer doesn’t quite display complex slides correctly. Create the PPT on my Mac, save it in One Drive (or even Dropbox), and there it is on all my devices at the same time.

There are lots of choices about how to get Office. This product - the key card - is somewhat more traditional…you download the software and install it using the serial number on your key. It’s a big download, but if you have a fast Internet connection, the whole thing only takes a few minutes. If you use Office on multiple devices, you might want to compare the key card approach to an Office 365 subscription…in my case, I have two mobile devices, three Macs and a Windows computer - one license of Office 365 covers all that, plus ongoing upgrades, way less expensively than buying individual keys for each system.

However you get it, Office 2016 is definitely the best Office yet, but it has no huge surprises in terms of functionality. The overall look is fresh and updated, but still familiar to anyone who has used Office in the past. The apps are large and can be slow on older, marginal computers, but they tend to run really well on the latest hardware. If you’re a guru at using obscure Word features, you’ll find that they all work pretty much the same way, and documents you created years ago still view and print correctly. I always had minor formatting and usage issues with the prior Mac version - so far, everything I’ve tried seems to work better in Office 2016, and that alone is probably a good enough reason to upgrade.