Review by Jerry Palmerino

Office 2016 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One Note. I came from Office 2011 which included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. I never really used Outlook on my Mac, so I don’t see losing it with the 2016 version a big loss.

2011 had a variation of the Ribbon interface. I have never really been a fan of the Ribbon, but on the 2011 version it was tolerable (compared to the Windows version at work). This new Mac version has a newly cleaned up and color-coded full-blown Ribbon, with all uppercase letters to be consistent with Microsoft’s new best UI theme.

If you have ever used Office, then you know what Office is all about. If you haven’t though, Word is for documents, PowerPoint is for slides, and Excel is for spreadsheets. OneNote is a note taking and saving application similar to Evernote.

This product just includes a license key in the box. You must download the software at office.com. This type of delivery is ok in 2015, especially since a lot of Macs don’t have disk drives anymore. My 2012 Macbook does. An external Superdrive is always available, as are USB DVD drives. But I am digressing, since this is a download product. It is a 1.26GB download.

Microsoft does give you the option to order installation media during the online setup wizard.

Overall, this is a great looking, clean version of Office, even if you don’t care for the Ribbon UI.