Review by Mary Jo Sminkey

A year ago, Amazon offered me a copy of Office 365 for Mac, this year, I got the standalone Home and Student version to try. While usually I prefer paying once for software, it’s hard to look at the pricing and not see the value in considering the cloud version. You not only get 1 TB of cloud storage, you get the full suite of products, at a price that gives you two years of access for less than the standalone software costs. Of course, Mac users still don’t get ALL the software that PC users get, and until they do, I will not give ANY Office version more than 4 stars at best. While I wouldn’t tend to use Access as much these days, Publisher is software that absolutely should be included in the Mac version when PC users get it. However, this review is for Home and Student which only includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Note that Outlook is not included, something to be aware of if you are looking at purchasing this version, over the 365 Personal license which DOES include it. Of these, OneNote is the application I haven’t used a whole lot, simply because I have so much in Evernote and haven’t really had a need to look at migrating to OneNote. You can get OneNote as a standalone on the Mac Store for free, so it’s worth looking at if you don’t already use Evernote, but if you do want to use it, you almost certainly would want the 365 version so you have cloud storage for easy sharing of your notes across your desktop and mobile devices. Likewise a lot of the newer features in the other applications require cloud storage, such as sharing features. While you don’t have to have a 365 license to use these, the only cloud services available are MS’s OneDrive cloud service and Sharepoint. It’s very annoying that they don’t offer such popular cloud services like Dropbox but clearly they want to push users to get the 365 licenses instead which include the full 1TB of storage. If you don’t need to keep a lot of docs on OneDrive though, the free account may work fine for you.

Now if you are a current Office for Mac user, the question is whether there are suitable updates here to look at upgrading. If you are more than 1 or two versions behind, it’s pretty much a given that you would want to update, the new ribbon (toolbar) is much more elegant and user friendly, proper keyboard shortcuts are available, the various Mac touch gestures are supported, etc. And there’s tons of improvements in the applications themselves. I particularly loved the new theme designer feature in Powerpoint which gives you not only many more slide designs, but makes it really easy to switch them to different color schemes. Slide transitions are now better supported across PC and Mac versions and there is an improved presenter view, and dedicated animations panel. The formula designer in Excel has been updated, and there is better support for the full range of functions that the PC version had. More chart designs are now available, and comments in Word can now be fully threaded conversations. Print to PDF is better in all the apps, as well. Overall, the features definitely are worth a look, but the lack of Outlook and high cost for just the 3 main programs (OneNote being free to download anyway) does make it a bit hard to recommend this version over a 365 license. If you don’t need Outlook, don’t have a need to upgrade your apps very often, don’t plan to use cloud sharing much, and mainly just want copies of the applications for cross-platform support with PC users that send you files, this might be worth considering versus the 365 version, but you’ll need to use it for more than 2 years before you see any savings. So I rather the upgrade as a solid 4 stars, but I’d give this specific version only 3 stars for the value that you are getting for the price.