Review by Brian A. Wolters

I am a long time Office user. I am also a SOLO IT Director for a small, multi-million dollar business. We need Office. There is no way around it. VBA and Excel is a small business’ best friend. For the casual users these days, that is hard to say, especially if a lot of people are happy with JUST a Smart Phone. But that is another discussion for another time. Is Office still a great choice? YES.

The first thing you will notice and these days, you don’t get much on media. Everything has pretty much moved to download. Office 2016 is no exception. Depending on your speeds, downloads can take a good while. But installation was pretty easy. Activation can be a tad convoluted but just pay attention to the screen prompts.

I am a heave Excel user, so I spent the bulk of my time with it and digging into all of its features. It was fast and for the most part stable. One thing I’ve noticed in my small business environment, is that since the last batch of updates from Microsoft, VBA has been acting a little strange and so solution from Microsoft yet. Mostly when it deals with attacking an external XLA file to an Excel project when other sheets are open. The other apps are also quite good and I for one am a fan of the Ribbon. It is very functional and useful.

Office 2016 is focused on the cloud for sure but you can still save locally. It is as good idea to set up OneDrive, if you use it. DO note, the 1TB of OneDrive Space only applies if you use Office 365.

Which bring me to Office 365. Do you need a standalone Office copy these days? For us in a small business, yes. We looked into Office 365 and while we do use it for E-Mail, Skype for Business and SharePoint, it was too expensive up front to include Office. And a lot of people do not want recurring charges. Office 365 for the home user is a great value but standalone versions of office are still functional and you don’t have to worry about the yearly renewal.

Office is still the king of functionality on both the PC and the Mac.