Review by Ed

I’ve been using Office 2011 for Mac for a few years and it’s been fine. I also use Office 2007 for Windows and both have been fine. Recently, I started using Office 2016 for Windows for work and wondered how the new Mac version looked. I have to tell you, all the professional reviews I read were very high on Office 2016 for Mac, but all the user reviews on Amazon and elsewhere painted a completely different picture. I went into my evaluation of Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac with huge reservations, but after about a week, I’m beginning to think that Microsoft may have resolved many of the issues that that existed at launch.

I’m using an old MacBook Air (mid 2012) with just 4GB of RAM and the Office installation did not suddenly bog my system down, nor have I had problems actually running Office. Every piece of the suite–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook–runs smoothly on my Mac. And they look so much better than Office 2011. One bummer I didn’t know about in advance was that Outlook 2016 for Mac only supports Exchange Server 2012 and above and my company hasn’t yet upgraded to the newer Exchange server. I’m not sure why this limitation exists for the Mac, because the Windows version works fine with the older Exchange server.

I also want to mention that I researched the licensing and from what I’ve read, you can install this version more than once, but it can only be running on one computer at a time. If you happen to get a new computer or you reinstall the OS, you’re allowed to install it again. The caveat is that you must uninstall it from everywhere else and you can only do this once every 90 days. Also keep in mind that this version does not allow you to install Office on your iPad or iPhone. Those licenses only come with a subscription to Office 365.