Review by NoVA Music Lover

It’s been quite a while since the last Microsoft Office release for Macintosh, but so far, I’m very impressed with Office 2016 for Mac. The user interface has been freshened to match the Windows version and still remains very easy to use for day-to-day work, while being very powerful under the hood. Mastering Office for either platform will take some work, but there are few programs out there that have the following or power of the Microsoft Office suite.

Installation is very easy. You’re directed to go to a web site, set up a Microsoft account and enter a 25 character product key. The download is a bit over 1gb, so if you have a slow Internet connection, it may take a while. Once the download is complete, run the installer which will want an administrators password. Once the installation process begins, it takes a few minutes to complete. My system has a solid state drive, so it was just over four minutes start to finish. Slower machines can take much longer.

The final step is to activate the installation which requires you to enter the email and password used to set up your Microsoft account.

Overall, I’m very happy with this release. Office 2011 was getting long in the tooth and the 2016 release will help ensure compatibility with other Office users.