Office on the Mac has always been an afterthought for Microsoft, and not as full-featured as its PC equivalent.
Microsoft has a different development team working on Office for the Mac, and, over the years, people have wondered if the team was just a couple of engineers working in the Microsoft basement. (If you’re curious, here’s a video of the team from a couple of years ago: Office for Apple Team).
Microsoft has made many improvements in its 2016 version for the Mac. If you’re used to the PC version, the Mac version now much more closely resembles it.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have improved features and interface.
Excel for Mac has many new features but still does not support pivot charts, if that’s important to you. (Here’s an article from Microsoft about those: Overview of Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts). PowerPoint has many new templates and now has presentation mode, but does not allow you to record your presentation with a narration and save it as a movie.
Here’s a more detailed article: Office for Mac 2016 Overview.
Outlook 2016 for the Mac is also improved, at least for working with email. For example, you can now have different signatures for different email accounts. But if you’d like to access your contacts and/or calendar from your mobile device, there is no mechanism for sync with Outlook on the Mac. If that’s important to you, then you’ll have to use the Mac Address book and Calendar program instead.
Make sure that you’re keeping your Office for Mac updated with the latest software releases and bug fixes. If you haven’t updated yet to El Capitan, it’s important to update your Office software first or you may run into trouble. And if you have updated to El Capitan, make sure that you have the latest version of the OS as Apple has improved compatibility with Office.
Need help with Office for the Mac? Contact me.
