Hands-on review: Office 2016

Introduction

(Note that this is our take on the preview of Office 2016. Although this is unfinished goods, it is likely that the final version won't be dramatically different from the one we reviewed)

Microsoft is the productivity company, claims CEO Satya Nadella. While that includes a range of products from the Office 365 cloud services to the mobile apps for iOS and Android (along with Skype for Business, Dynamics and Power BI), for most people, Microsoft Office is "top-of-the-mind" for productivity software.

That said, between Google Docs, Apple's Numbers and Pages, Libre Office and even Box's Office viewers, Microsoft Office has plenty of competition. With Office 2016, Microsoft needed to update its core tools, build on cloud services like OneDrive and Office 365, and deliver tools for tablets that might never have a keyboard connected.

Redmond must also bring its new cross-platform strategy to OS X users who care more about the fact that Office on the Mac went for almost five years without a significant update, than the fact that Word and Excel actually started out on the Mac (before Windows), decades ago.

What we're actually getting with Office 2016 isn't the same Office everywhere. It's more like the right Office for each of the three platforms explored today.

• Windows still getting the lion's share of tools and features simply because it's had the most attention over the years. In the preview, the most important new features (beyond interface updates) are for business intelligence in Excel – and for information protection and Office 365 admin.


• Office 2016 for Mac is a preview with many new features that has the feel of a real Mac application and the tools of a real version of Office – but it's not finished, and even when it is, it won't have all the Office applications and it won't get all the Windows Office features.


• The touch version of Office sits somewhere between Office for iPad and the Windows RT version of Office for Home and Student, but brings in features from Office Online.

Microsoft is trying to make sense of the core Office tools across multiple platforms. So what will Office 2016 do for your productivity? In this article, we'll take a look at Office 2016 for Windows, Office for Windows 10 (the equivalent of Office for iPad on Windows 10 phones and tablets) and the long awaited Office 2016 for Mac.

• You can learn more about how to download Office 2016 for Windows and Office 2016 for Mac via those two links. You might also want to check out our Office 2016 news and features roundup

Hands on with Office 2016

Office 2016

At this point, the question for Office on Windows isn't so much how much more can you do with it, as how can you be more efficient/productive with what you have? That's the direction we're seeing Office 2016 go towards, for administrators as well as users.

There are some excellent new features in individual apps and some welcome improvements across the suite on the interface front, as well as new security and management options. But this is also a very familiar territory, to the point that we haven't yet found any new features that are specific to Word or PowerPoint 2016.

It has the same simple click-to-run install that streams the Office code and lets you start using Office before the installation finishes (the little video you watch actually plays in PowerPoint). If the feature you want hasn't downloaded, the application will let you know – and prioritise installing that code next so you can use it.

The universal look

Microsoft is calling Office 2016 more colourful; we'd call it slightly chunkier as well. In fact the interface now gives you a choice of five Office Themes rather than the three in Office 2013. You can still have a white or light grey header and background on each window, and only see the accent colour for each program in the status bar and the 'backstage' menu that opens when you click the File tab on the ribbon.

The new medium grey theme is a similar high contrast theme to the dark grey theme in Office 2013, with a darker grey background and black backstage menu – the Office 2016 dark grey theme really is dark grey, so that icons and commands have even higher contrasts. Some people prefer the look but again it's there as an accessibility option for those with visual problems.

The new Colourful theme picks up the solid slabs of colour in Windows 10, painting them across the title bar and the tab bar on the ribbon to ensure you can't miss that the window which is blue at the top is a Word document, and the window that's green at the top is your spreadsheet.

That's more useful on Windows 10 where icons on the taskbar have been shrunk down to make room for the ever-present Cortana search bar and open icons are highlighted only by a barely visible line underneath – so you might need a thick slice of colour to spot them.

Office 2016 picks up another Windows 10 styling – the title and ribbon tab bars in Office used to be smaller than the title and ribbon tab bars in Windows tools like Explorer. Now they're the same height, which means you lose a little more of your screen to the interface rather than keeping it for your document – even with the ribbon collapsed.

That's particularly noticeable in Windows 10, where there is a large vertical gap between the title bar and the ribbon tab bar to fit in the new Tell Me tool. This may be an artefact of the Windows 10 preview builds, or it may be that this chunky new style is Microsoft's fresh design direction.

Tell Me is a feature Office Online users will recognise (it's also in Office 2016 for Mac, but it works slightly differently there). Despite the ribbon, there are still plenty of tools hidden away in dialog boxes – and even the tools on the ribbon may not be where you expect.

It gives you a search box where you can type what you want to do (line spacing, print, and so on) and get a mini menu of tools that match what you're asking for. If the tool you want is in the list, you can click on it to use the feature.

There are some useful improvements to the backstage menu (below). On the Info pane, you see more of the details about your file without having to click again to see all details, like the times when you created, last changed and last printed the file – they used to be hidden away.

For files you save to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business, the list of recent files in each application is also more useful. It still roams between the devices where you sign in with the same Microsoft account (even if that's not the account you bought Office with) so you can pick up where you left off on another PC very quickly.

And it's now grouped and labelled – any files you've pinned so they're always there are in the Pinned group and the others are grouped under Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week and Older, which can speed up finding what you need. Plus each document is also marked with the file location, which can be another clue for picking between two similar file names.

This is all extremely useful and make it even more annoying that recent and pinned files still don't make it to the jump lists for the Office application in the Windows taskbar. It's also frustrating that not all of your Office settings roam yet – your custom dictionary does, but your spell checking settings (like whether to ignore words with numbers in), your AutoCorrect dictionary and your Outlook email signatures don't, for example.

Equally annoyingly, Windows users don't get the same level of OneDrive integration as seen in Office for Mac 2016, where you can see files and folders that have been shared with you in the list of OneDrive files and folders. That means when someone shares a file you won't know unless they send you a mail or you go to OneDrive on the web and look (and even if they mail you, you have to go back and find the message when you want to work on the file).

You only see shared files you've already opened in the list; useful for carrying on with work, not useful for getting started on a project. One thing Microsoft might learn from cloud-first solutions like Google Apps.

You might get more links from colleagues now that the Share pane includes the option to send a link as well as sending an attachment or inviting them to collaborate on OneDrive. Inviting someone emails the link, and receiving the link displays a URL you can copy or you can share directly to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn – and each time you can use a link that lets people view the document or join in and edit it too.

As with Office 2013, multiple people can edit a shared document. There are no changes to how this works in Office 2016, but we found that Word continued to show that someone else was editing a document they'd been working on in Word 2016 up to 30 minutes after they'd actually closed it.

One interface change will be useful for documents you're opening from the cloud – if you open a file with large charts or SmartArt diagrams, you usually have to wait for the whole thing to load. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2016, if you're opening a document on a slow network, you get a placeholder so you can work with the rest of the document while the objects load (they're the correct size so the document won't reflow when the download finishes, you just can't edit them). The download progress bar in the status bar lets you know more clearly how long you'll be waiting for the rest of your document, which is also helpful.

Management and security

The Office 2016 preview is currently only available to Office 365 users, and only for the Pro Plus plans (because those include the licences for all the applications and features), but so far not all of the management features coming in this release are enabled.

Admins get more customisation options for the Click-to-Run setup (you still use the Office deployment tools to work with this) and Microsoft says there are general bug fixes and security updates in the installer. You'll be able choose how often you get bug fixes and new features without blocking security updates and you can use System Center Configuration Manager to manage monthly Office updates.

The Office 2016 applications work with the same Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based single sign-in for multi-factor authentication that you can currently use in preview with Office 2013 Windows clients, so users don't see as many Office 365 sign-in screens, and that multi-factor authentication now works for Outlook as well.

The preview also includes an updated version of the Office 2013 Telemetry Dashboard, an Excel workbook for looking at the information the telemetry agent in the Office applications collects about how users in the domain use documents – so you can see if key documents like spreadsheets are crashing often with the preview.

On Windows, Office has had the option of limiting what people can do with the documents you share with them, and even the emails you send, for years. As long as you have Rights Management Services (RMS) on Windows Server or the new Azure Rights Management Service, you can turn on Information Rights Management (IRM) and choose whether a document can be copied, printed, forwarded or not, and stop it being opened after an expiry date you choose. You can also read protected documents directly in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and (new in 2016) Visio in the business versions of Office on Windows, without needing a separate app.

This is a feature that is getting more interesting now that people can also open those documents on iPhones, iPads, Macs and, soon, Android devices and read IRM-protected email in Outlook for Mac (again, that's coming to iOS and Android versions of Outlook soon) as well as Outlook Web Access and the free RMS apps.

Office 2016 also extends the Outlook Data Loss Prevention features right into Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Previously, if you tried to email out information that might be confidential or against regulations, you'd see a mail tip in Outlook – if your administrators had turned on DLP rules in Exchange like not letting you send credit card numbers. Now you'll see a warning right inside the app, say if you try to save a document with information you're not supposed to share in the wrong location.

As with the Outlook mail tips, you get a warning at the top of your document saying that you shouldn't be doing that, but you also have the option of doing it anyway and providing a reason why you need to. Microsoft calls this the 'break the glass' option; you can get out in an emergency, but you set off an alarm by doing it – because your manager will get a message that you're bypassing the rules along with your explanation, and they can choose whether the message gets sent.

That lets you set up rules to protect data but gives people a say in when they're applied, because information security is really a management rather than a technology issue. After all, if you really want to pass on information you're not supposed to, you can pull out a phone and take pictures of your screen to share; you just can't pretend that you didn't know you were doing anything wrong.

Outlook

Outlook has some other great new features, especially the new list of recent files that pops up when you click to add an attachment. After all, the file you're most likely to want to send to someone is probably the one you've just been working on.

If you have a touchscreen you don't just see that list of recent files in the ribbon when you choose Attach File – you can also get at it from the now context-sensitive action bar at the side of the screen. Instead of greying out the tools that you can't use when you're replying to a message, the new action bar replaces them with common options – attaching a file, popping out or discarding the message, or setting it as 'important'.

That's a good move in terms of the responsive design that fits Outlook into smaller windows better – instead of shrinking down all the panes you have displayed so you can't really see any of them, Outlook now shows you just the inbox list or just the message pane, depending on what you have selected. That will work well on smaller tablets.

The drop-down menu for handling attachments is useful on smaller screens and touch systems. Instead of having to right click to do anything except preview an attachment, you now get a drop-down menu that lets you open, print, save or copy the file – even when you're previewing it.

Also useful on smaller tablets is the option to save less of your inbox on the device. In Outlook 2013, the default is to download the last month's worth of email and you can't choose anything less than that. In Outlook 2016, you can keep two weeks, one week, three days or even just one day of messages to save space. The slightly faster search of mail you're keeping on Exchange comes in useful if you do that, as does the better performance on slow networks (Outlook should freeze less while it's trying to stay connected to the server on a poor network connection).

Excel

The improved business intelligence tools are the main focus in Excel 2016. Power Query is now a built-in Excel feature rather than an add-on, and if you use any of the Power View, Power Pivot and Power Map features, they all turn on ready to use, and Power View now works with data from OLAP cubes. When you're adding fields to Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts you can now search for the field you want rather than having to scroll through the list, which should save time.

For speed you can also open large spreadsheets from SharePoint or OneDrive for Business as read only (although we had problems with OneDrive for Business crashing Excel).

Working with the slicers that let you quickly filter tables and Pivot Tables using a touchscreen gets easier in Excel 2016. In Excel 2013 you could only select one item in a slicer using touch – now you can press and hold to get a control that switches you into multi-select mode, although it would be easier if you could just tap on multiple items to select them one after another.

There are new features for data model Pivot Tables – which use the Velocity engine and will eventually replace the older Pivot Tables in Excel. You can now group them by time, and there's a handy tool to automatically build relationships between the tables you add to your data model for the Pivot Table without you having to do it by hand.

Not all of the promised improvements are ready yet. You're supposed to be able to rename tables, columns or measures in Power Pivot (which opens in a separate window with its own tools) and have those names show up automatically in your PivotTables, although we got warnings to rename columns in Excel instead.

The Excel 2013 spreadsheet comparison tool is still included with Excel 2016 to help you quickly track changes to cells and sheets in your workbooks – but it's still a separate app instead of a feature inside Excel, and it still looks like it belongs in Windows XP or Vista instead of a current version of Office. Like the powerful but confusing array of business intelligence tools in Excel, this is the scattergun approach of adding in tools that are hugely useful but don't all fit neatly together.

Fewer changes

Other Office applications have fewer changes. Apart from the new Office themes, OneNote looks identical to the 2013 release – as does Access, and neither have the Tell Me bar for finding commands. Project gets a new timeline view that shows multiple timeline bars together; you can also show just specific phases of a project in the timeline bar by picking the date range. Visio comes with a set of starter diagrams that show you how to work with specific templates, with some handy tips for using Visio itself. The keyboard shortcuts for the shape panel in Visio will speed things up for more experienced users.

Skype for Business

Microsoft is in the middle of changing the name of its Lync communications software – what you get in the Office preview is called Lync on the Start menu and Skype for Business when you launch it. It has the features of Lync in a more Skype-like UI, which works well.

You get Skype's floating call monitor so you can work in other apps during a call and be able to mute or hang up the call without going back to the main window. And you can easily add both Skype and Lync contacts, as long as your admin has enabled Lync and Skype federation. At the moment you don't see user icons for Skype contacts, but you can add them to standard Lync groups like Friends and Family. We had difficulty joining scheduled meetings with the preview client, but it worked flawlessly for calls to and from Skype.

OneDrive for Business

Microsoft is hard at work merging OneDrive and OneDrive for Business into a single system with a single sync engine, but the preview of OneDrive for Business that you get with Office 2016 – which is more like the OneDrive client in Windows – is still a different beast with a different interface.

You can pick what it syncs from your PC to the SharePoint site where OneDrive for Business lives, but instead of a helpful interface to do that, the interface tells you to 'paste in your library' without telling you what that means or how to find the information. For browsing and saving files already in your OneDrive for Business, the improved backstage menu works well – as long as OneDrive for Business doesn't crash, which it did repeatedly on our test PCs.

Clearly, Microsoft is still ironing out bugs in OneDrive for Business as it rewrites it. Eventually it should be a friendly way for users to save files in the cloud and share them securely, but it's not there yet.

Early verdict

When software is as powerful, as mature and as complex as Office is on Windows, making it easier to use can be as important as adding more features. That's the trade-off Microsoft has been making with Office since the ribbon interface was first introduced.

So far, apart from the improved BI tools in Excel and the security and management enhancements, the interface changes are the most significant updates in Office 2016. That includes the way Outlook lets you get straight to recent files when you need to attach them to an email, which is a tiny feature that's enormously useful. It's disappointing that Windows users don't get the superb OneDrive integration that's on the Mac preview, where you can finally see files that have been shared with you by other people – saving a huge amount of time when you're collaborating.

As with the Mac and touch versions of Office 2016, this is very much still a preview. We didn't find any missing features and we saw very few performance and stability issues, but we did have at least one crash in Word on two different test machines, and sending long documents to OneNote was slower and more likely to cause the software to hang than in Office 2013. Scrolling or saving a long document in Word often made the cursor jump to another part of the document.

We haven't seen the final feature list for Office 2016, but because the way people pay for Office is changing it may not need to be as impressive as in previous releases. More and more Office users are buying an Office 365 subscription that will get them Office 2016 without them paying anything extra, so even a relatively modest update will get adopted quickly. As usual, remember that some business features will only make it into the business SKUs of Office – in particular the information security and BI tools.

Hands on with Office for Windows 10

Office for Windows 10

The equivalent of Office for iPad on Windows 10 phones and tablets will be called Office for Windows 10 (and it will come pre-installed on those phones and small tablets). On other devices, like notebooks with touchscreens, you'll be able to download the apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote – from the Windows Store (a phrase that doesn't make it clear if it's always free).

These are 'universal' Windows apps that will adjust to different size screens by changing their interface to show more or less information, depending on whether they have more or less display space to fill. So you'll get the same version of Outlook on your phone as on your 12-inch notebook, but it will look different on the smaller screen.

So far, there are previews for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and they're designed for notebooks and larger tablets. There will be previews of the same apps for phones and small tablets soon, probably after the next Windows 10 preview build for phones. Be prepared to be patient when installing – the Windows 10 Beta Store is still very much a preview service and we had problems getting the Office apps to install correctly on multiple test machines.

Even the versions of Office for Windows 10 not designed for small tablets have a 'touch-optimised' large and chunky interface that will be easy to use with your fingers (but takes up a great deal of the screen when you're using the mouse). They have the new universal app styling you'll be familiar with for Windows 10 apps, but for some reason, there are two title bars. One of these tells you which app you're running and holds the window controls, and the other shows the document name (as well as a bar showing the ribbon tabs and some common commands like Undo, plus the ribbon itself).

That means you get the same vibrant slice of colour at the top of the window (and unlike Office 2016, there are no other interface themes to choose from).

Word for Windows 10

Some of the simplifications make Word for Windows clear and easy to use. You're automatically signed into the OneDrive for the Microsoft account you used to access the Windows Store, and you can add other Microsoft cloud lockers like OneDrive for Business. The File menu shows recent files, handily grouped into Today, Last Week and Older, with the file location shown, and when you open a document you get Word's handy pop-up bookmark to jump straight to where you were last working.

When you create a new document you choose where to save it before you start working in it, because files are autosaved at regular intervals. We like the fact that you can set the default save location and just create a document and start work straight away – but because you don't get prompted to choose the document name, you get a lot of files called Document with a string of numbers. If you actually want to choose the file name, you have to save a copy (and then go back and delete the original). Never losing work is a good thing; not being able to name your own files without jumping through hoops isn't.

The touch-centric interface will look familiar to iPad users. It has the friendly finger cursor controls for moving the insertion point or selecting, and when you tap with your finger you get a Cut, Copy and Paste menu popping up, with extra options to paste with formatting, text or images. Tap on a spelling mistake and you get a similar touch menu of possible words (which lets you add the word to your dictionary). The Find interface opens as a simple search bar (and yes, Ctrl-F works); tap the cog icon and you can choose to match a whole word, match the case of what you're looking for, search for things that sound the same or do a find and replace.

The formatting, inserting and layout tools aren't comprehensive, but they give you what you need. You get simple shapes to draw diagrams but no charts or Smart Art – open a document with charts or Smart Art in and you'll see it as an image and even choose how text flows around it, but you can't edit it. If you're reading a document like that you can switch to reading view, as in the full version of Word, which lays the document out to fit the screen and lets you change to sepia or white on black, and scroll sideways rather than down. You can also turn on a Bing search called Insights that looks up background information, websites and news stories for selected words.

You do get track changes, comments and co-editing though, and there's an icon at the top of the window to show you if anyone else is working in the document with you. You can tap that to see who has access and share the file – as an attachment or link – with others. That's easier to find than the same icon in the status bar in Word – Word for Windows doesn't have a status bar so you have to delve into the Review ribbon and open a menu to get a word count (although page numbers pop up at the bottom of the screen as you scroll).

You hardly need it with these few commands, but the lightbulb icon opens the Tell Me menu – as in Office 2016, that gives you matching commands you can use straight from the menu.

The oddest limitation might be that you can only have one document open at once. If you create a new document, the document you already have open will be closed without giving you a chance to change your mind – so you can't look at two documents at the same time. That makes Word for Windows not nearly as useful as you'd expect – and rather too much like the web version of Word.

Excel for Windows 10

Excel for Windows 10 has the same touch-friendly interface that makes it easy to select, move and insert cells, and the same frustrating limitations like not being able to choose your own file names. But the interface isn't as stripped down as Word – you get a status bar that lets you switch between sheets in your workbook and see the results of common formulas like sum and average for selected cells.

You can turn grid lines, headings, sheet tabs and even the formula bar off if you want to save space, and while you can't view two documents at the same time, you can freeze the first row or column of a worksheet to make it easier to see labels as you scroll through the document.

There are plenty of features you don't get here – you can't run VBA macros and you can't even open spreadsheets with Power View sheets. But you can create tables, apply cell styles, add a wide range of formulas from text handling to engineering and statistical functions – and even create charts and Smart Art (so perhaps those features will also show up in Word for Windows). You can even select data and have Excel suggest the best chart type to view it in. If you've been envying iPad users the combination of power and simplicity in Excel for iPad, Excel for Windows will make you happy.

PowerPoint for Windows 10

Like Excel, PowerPoint for Windows 10 also has some limitations on what files it can open. We couldn't retrieve presentations on our list of recent files that were on websites (even the Microsoft Channel 9 website), even though we could open the same files directly from the website.

The Presenter View isn't as useful as we'd hoped. For one thing, it's not really full-screen; the title bar at the top of the window never goes away and neither does the Windows taksbar. You can zoom out to get the slide view if you want to jump around in the presentation or zoom in to see more details, and when you annotate your slides with the pen tools you can save those annotations for next time. When you press on the screen with your finger you get a little laser pointer, so this is obviously designed for presenting on an external screen or projector, which makes it strange that there's no way to see your slide notes in this view.

The reviewing options are also disappointing in this preview – you can see comments and mark-up on the slides but not reply to them or add your own.

The editing tools are more useful. You can edit an existing file, including creating new slides and picking from a full range of layouts, transitions and picture formatting options, or create a presentation from scratch (although there's only one theme and trying to select it repeatedly crashed PowerPoint for Windows – as did trying to use many of the other features ). You can create Smart Art as well as shapes, but not charts.

That's a fair selection of tools for working with presentations, even if several tools show up on more than one ribbon tab – that feels more like putting them everywhere you'd need rather than trying to pad out the interface. And again, if you can't track down a feature you think is in the product, you can use the Tell Me menu to find it.

OneNote for Windows 10

Fans of the touch version of OneNote for Windows 8 and the Windows RT desktop version of OneNote – or even the web-based OneNote Online – won't be impressed by the new OneNote for Windows 10. This is a very early and very simple version of OneNote that doesn't have as many features as the Windows RT OneNote or the engaging touch features of modern OneNote (which has an unusual radial menu for choosing tools).

This OneNote has a basic ribbon with just four tabs: Home, Insert, Draw and View. You can't record video or audio, or add tags to your notes, and all you can insert are tables, pictures, links and files – there's no way to clip in a selection of the screen, as in desktop OneNote, though you can copy and paste, print into OneNote or use the web clippers for IE and Chrome.

If you have a note with audio recorded on another device you can see a placeholder for the recording, but you can't play it. There's no sign of the Office Lens feature from Windows Phone, which lets you snap an accurate photograph of a document and send it to OneNote either.

You can draw or write with your finger, or a pen, with a choice of twelve ink colours and two pen styles (again, far more basic than the full version of OneNote).

The interface in OneNote for Windows is even more chunky than in the other Office apps because along with the usual two title bars (which aren't very useful without a document name to display), you can't close the ribbon tab bar and the ribbon, and there's also a bar showing tabs for the sections in your notebook. All this takes up nearly a quarter of the height of the window.

The big friendly page thumbnails work better – you can see the first few lines of text or the first image, and you can right click to manage the page. You can drag the thumbnails up and down to reorder the pages in a section but you can't drag them into another section – and you can't even see the list of other notebooks without using the 'hamburger' menu.

Microsoft is adopting the hamburger throughout Windows 10, in a misguided attempt to use a navigation familiar to Android and iOS users even when it's not appropriate or helpful. If you're going to sacrifice this much space on screen to show the interface, why not use some of it to let you switch notebooks more quickly?

Instead it's lumped in with Print and Settings (there isn't even a way to send a page by email in this version, let alone to tell someone you've shared a notebook with them on OneDrive, or OneDrive for Business – which are your only options for storing notebooks). It's not clear why OneNote doesn't just have the File menu – the way it does in the desktop version. Even the hamburger menu from OneNote Online would be more useful because you can pin it open.

Presumably, the existing Windows Store version of OneNote was overly designed with pen and touch in mind to be suitable as the basis of this new OneNote for Windows 10, and Microsoft has obviously started from scratch. What you get instead is a very basic tool with hardly any of the advantages of OneNote and an interface that takes up a great deal of room to do rather little. We expect Microsoft to improve this rapidly but it's a disappointing start.

Early verdict

Office for Windows 10 will catch Windows up to the iPad and Android devices in terms of having a free version of the key Office apps that let you edit as well as view documents. You get a reasonable selection of features – rather like the Office Online apps, without having to be online – in a friendly interface that's designed for touch, but still takes up far too much of the screen unless you're using a tablet in portrait rather than landscape.

There are some strange decisions in the name of simplicity – it's far too hard to choose your own file names and you can't even open spreadsheets with some complex functionality, and only being able to view a single document at a time is very limiting. This first preview is also unstable – we didn't lose any work thanks to the excellent autosave features but apps repeatedly crashed and closed when we tried to create new documents. We expect that to change quickly, and as it looks as if more features may be on the way for Word, we're hoping OneNote for Windows 10 will also gain at least some of its missing features. However, none of these applications even begin to compete with the desktop version of Office included with Windows RT.

• Windows 10: release date, price, news and features

Hands on with Office 2016 for Mac

Office 2016 for Mac

Microsoft's cross-platform strategy and emphasis on productivity means that Office on the Mac needs a major update. Office 2011 is so long in the tooth, and previous versions of Outlook on the Mac so much of an embarrassment, that it wouldn't be hard for this new release to look a lot better.

However, the preview of Office 2016 for Mac does better than that. It includes not just Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but Outlook for Mac (an upgrade to the new version previously available only if you had an Office 365 tenant) and an updated version of the free OneNote for Mac.

You don't get the extra-fast Windows-style click to run setup with the Office for Mac Preview, but the installation is straightforward – it takes five to ten minutes depending on the speed of your Mac, and you need 5.6GB of space.

Once the installation is done you get a real version of Office, with features and tools that will be familiar to Windows users, but in the form of real Mac applications as well. You get the ribbons and task panes of the Windows Office applications – although not always the full set of features.

(There are powerful features in all the Office programs that are still only on Windows. Office 2016 for Mac is definitely more powerful than Office for iPad and it has more features than the Windows RT version of Office, Office Online or the new Office for Windows 10 touch applications, but it's closer to Office Home and Student than the Pro version of Office 2013).

That said, you get these features as part of a true Mac interface, from the Retina graphics and high resolution document themes to the familiar scroll bounce. If anything, Office 2016 is almost too much of a Mac application, because instead of putting everything on the ribbon the way Office does on Windows, it both splits and duplicates features between the ribbon and the menus.

That's not just the file management tools on the File menu where you'd expect them (there's a File menu in Office 2013 too, which has the options for each program, whereas Office 2016 keeps Preferences on the Apple menu where Mac users will look for them). You get both a Table menu and a set of Table commands on the Insert tab of the ribbon in Word 2016, and the Tools menu and Review tab have almost the same set of commands – but not quite. The Protect Document command is on both the Tools menu and the Review tab – but the Restrict Permission tool from the Review tab is on the File menu instead.

Similarly, the commands from the View tab are split between the View and Window menus.

This gives menu fans the option of minimising the ribbon and ignoring it, but there are a few things ribbon users will have to go look for in the menu. Again, OneNote has nearly all of the ribbon features in the menus, but there are menu options – for example managing notebooks – that you can't do from the ribbon. (If you're having difficulty tracking down a command, use the search bar on the Help menu and it will pop up the menu you need with the command highlighted; a handy option from Office Online).

Although Office 2016 for Windows has more of Microsoft's modern design look, Office 2016 for OS X sticks firmly to the Yosemite look – Microsoft is thinking more of Mac users than visiting Windows users.

Cloud first

Office 2016 for Mac does the best job we've seen so far of integrating OneDrive – better than Office 2013 or even Windows 8.1. Not only does it show your OneDrive folders by default in the Open and Save dialogs (and OS X's multiple columns continue to be the best way to handle lots of nested folders), but you can see files and folders that have been shared with you right in the same dialog.

That makes collaboration far simpler – on Windows, you have to start in the OneDrive website rather than being able to open a document someone has shared directly in Word or Excel. Even the new Office 2016 for Windows Preview doesn't show folders and documents that are shared with you as clearly as this.

OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint are all in the Open and Save dialogs (and just as on Windows, Add a Service doesn't list any other cloud services yet, particularly not iCloud). However, you don't get the Other Web Locations list from Office 2013, which is a handy way of getting back to documents you've opened from websites. They're in the Recent documents list, which includes documents from cloud services that you've edited on other computers, but there isn't a central place to look back at them.

If you want to open or save a document on your Mac, or on a network or external drive, you click the On My Mac button in the dialog to switch to a standard OS X file dialog (although there's an Online Locations button to get back to the cloud file dialog). Perhaps confusingly, the On My Mac dialog is where you can save and open iCloud files – that's the same as any other Mac application, so it makes sense that Microsoft hasn't tried to duplicate it. Instead, as with ribbons and menus you get the Office experience where that's appropriate, and the standard Mac experience the rest of the time.

That Office experience pushes you towards saving documents in OneDrive (and OneDrive for Business and SharePoint) so you can use the new document sharing and the improved shared editing features.

Security and sharing

On Windows, Office puts the sharing options in the File menu; in Office 2016 for Mac they're right in front of you, in the title bar of each application. Click the 'head-plus' icon and you can invite people by email to view or edit your document, get a copy of a link (again, that can be for just viewing or editing as well) or email your document as an attachment (in its original file format or as a PDF).

The menu also shows you who you've already shared a document with and what they can do to it. With OneDrive, the document sharing is seamless and the colleague you share the document with doesn't even have to sign in. With SharePoint and OneDrive for Business you have more control and you can make sure people sign in if you don't want to give them anonymous access.

When someone else is editing your document, the collaboration in Word, Excel or PowerPoint isn't quite real-time. That's the same in Office 2013 – the idea is that you want the chance to choose when your document gets updated rather than just having sections of it appear, disappear or change without you noticing.

A change your co-editor makes to a document gets uploaded when they save it – you see an icon next to the section of the document they're working on, to warn you against making changes that might conflict with theirs, and the status bar tells you there are updates you can add to the document. Click the status bar or just save the document and it gets the changes highlighted so you can see them quickly. Click the icon to see more information about who's editing the document (if they haven't signed into OneDrive, they show up as guest) and you can email, chat or FaceTime with them (there are options to schedule meetings that tell you to get a version of Office that has Outlook integrated, so this feature is still in progress).

The co-editing isn't new for Mac users, but it was only in Word and Excel before, and it was rather more primitive. Now it's clearer and easier to use, and more like the Office 2013 experience (which makes it easier to explain to people on Windows how to use it).

Office 2016 for Mac also gets new ways of protecting documents. The Rights Management Services features Microsoft already added to Office for iPad are in the Mac preview as well, so you can send an email that someone can't forward, or set a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document so that it expires on a certain date and can't be printed or copied. In Outlook you set these restrictions from the Options tab on the ribbon in the message you're writing. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint you use the Restrict Permissions options in the File menu (another place splitting features between the ribbon and the menus gets confusing).

What Mac users don't get are the proactive Data Loss Prevention warnings in Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2016 on Windows, or the Outlook mail tips that tell you when you're trying to save or share information your admin has restricted. That's the kind of feature we expect Microsoft to add at least to Outlook for Mac over time though, because it relies on technology in Exchange.

Word for Mac

Having started life on the Mac, Word already has very much the same features as on Windows; in fact Word for Mac 2016 keeps a feature lost in Word 2013. When you control-click on a misspelled word to correct it, you can choose AutoCorrect to have the same mistake fixed automatically in future, which saves an enormous amount of time. (The same option is in the Excel spell check dialog, but again it was removed in Excel 2013.) That means the changes here are mostly to the interface.

The ribbon is now all but identical to the Windows version. Instead of spraying tabs for SmartArt, Tables, Charts and Document Elements across your screen, Word for Mac arranges those tools more logically into Insert, Design, Mailings and References (where they are in Word on Windows). You get the same drop-down galleries and context-sensitive extra tabs for editing and formatting objects, including some task panes for detailed settings like Format Text Effects (although there are still plenty of floating dialogs too).

The tools on the ribbons are almost identical – macros still live on a menu and you don't get inking (obviously), or the Selection Pane object browser from Windows. You don't get Office apps either; so far they're only in Outlook on the Mac.

Excel for Mac

Like Word on the Mac, Excel 2016 has an improved ribbon using the same tabs as Excel 2013, but the similarities are now deeper than just the interface. Many of the function key shortcuts have been the same in Word and Excel on the Mac and Windows for years (because they were in the early Mac versions of Word and Excel long before Office came to Windows), so Shift-F3 cycles selected text through upper and lower case in Word on both Windows and OS X, and F5 opens the Go To dialog in Excel.

If you know Excel on Windows well, there are a lot of other keyboard shortcuts that can save you time, like using Ctrl-semicolon to insert today's date. Many of those work in Excel for Mac now – even Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste, which will save you time if you switch between different computers frequently. It's also a big help for familiar shortcuts like Ctrl-H for Replace All where the Command key equivalent is already used by OS X.

Not all the Excel for Windows shortcuts are available though, because there are some (like F12 for Save As) that are already used by OS X for other things. And it's only Excel that has these shortcuts; Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V don't work in Word or PowerPoint. That makes them a little less useful, because you have to switch fingers if you want to copy from Excel and paste into Word, but power users in Excel tend to use the keyboard extensively and this will make them more productive.

More importantly, Excel for Mac 2016 includes more of the functions and formulas that are in Excel for Windows (including the Analysis Toolpak for statistical functions), and the improved Formula Builder is still easier to use than in Excel 2013. On Windows, it's a popup dialog with a second dialog that helps you fill in the terms of a formula but is usually on top of the cells you're working with – on the Mac it's a task pane docked neatly out of the way with enough room to list the functions and explain them. Double click on a function and you get the fields to fill in, but you can still see your spreadsheet.

Macros are still supported in Excel 2016, but unless you save your spreadsheet as a macro-enabled file the menu entries are all greyed out so you can't make a new macro. There's also a new equation editor (which will be familiar to Windows Excel users), allowing you to pick from common equations or build your own by dragging and dropping terms and functions.

In the Office 2016 Preview for Windows, Power Query is now a built-in Excel feature rather than an add-on you have to download. Excel 2016 for Mac doesn't have that even as an option and spreadsheets with Power Query content will open as read only. You don't get Pivot Charts or the PowerPivot feature for handling very large spreadsheets in memory. You do get pivot table slicers, though; visual controls you can add to a spreadsheet to make it easier to manipulate your view of the data.

The quick analysis tool isn't in Excel for Mac, but the Recommended Charts and Recommended Pivot Tables tools make it faster to do quick visualisations. And you still have all the conditional formatting, spark lines and other visual tools to help interpret your data.

PowerPoint for Mac

PowerPoint 2011 had a particularly sprawling ribbon, with a total of nine tabs – PowerPoint 2016 is neater, tidier, and again matches the Windows version. It also gets the presenter view from PowerPoint 2013 showing your slide notes and a timer as well as thumbnails for your next few slides, which makes it easier to keep your place in your presentation.

There are new slide transitions (matching the long list in PowerPoint 2013 so your presentation will play properly on both Mac and Windows), and the new animations task pane is – like the Excel 2016 Formula Builder – nicer than the Windows equivalent. This is because tools like Effect Options, Timing and SmartArt animation are visible as soon as you select an animation rather than hidden on a fly-out menu.

There are two new default slide layouts in the blank presentation template, with vertical text (they're not in PowerPoint 2013, although you could create them yourself). If you use comments in PowerPoint, getting the threaded comments from PowerPoint 2013 is helpful, especially if a lot of people are chiming in. Microsoft has also promised a way to 'visually compare version conflicts'; in PowerPoint 2013 that's a Compare button on the Review tab which shows a list of changes to individual slides and the overall presentation, with tags on the slide to show where each change is. That seems to be one of the features that's not yet in the preview though.

And again, there are some PowerPoint 2013 features that haven't made it to the Mac yet, like being able to translate content on your slides or present online directly from PowerPoint, using Lync or the free Office Presentation Service.

Outlook for Mac

The previous version of Outlook for Mac was an unreliable and underpowered program that was deservedly unpopular. The preview is a slightly updated version of the Outlook for Mac that was previously available only to Office 365 users – which is a major improvement over the previous options, though still not comparable to Outlook 2013.

You get mail, calendar, contacts and tasks, plus categories you've created in other versions of Outlook sync across, and you can view a colleague's shared calendar next to yours, to see when you're both free, as well as three days of weather predictions. And if you use Office apps, like the built-in Action Items and Suggested Meetings, they work here as well.

On the other hand, there's no equivalent of the Quick Step tool for quick filing and you don't see favourite folders you've picked the way you do on Windows, just the system folders like Archive, News Feed and Clutter. You won't see any Search Folders you've made on Windows either, just the preset Smart Folders. You can make a new Smart Folder to match Search Folders you already use, but the process isn't as simple as on Windows.

You do get the threaded view of messages in a conversation, as well previews of messages in the inbox pane, and unlike Outlook 2013 you won't find some messages in a threaded conversation getting hidden when you expand the thread.

Outlook for Mac includes the Online Archive option (which Microsoft also refers to as a Personal Archive and an In-Place Archive) for moving emails out of your primary mailbox to save space – on Windows that's an Office Professional Plus feature, and you have to use Exchange as your mail server. In Outlook 2016 you can move messages into your archive, and view them as well. You might want to consider that if you get a lot of mail, because currently Outlook for Mac doesn't let you choose how many emails to download; when you connect an account it grabs your whole mailbox.

Even with these drawbacks, Outlook for Mac is streets ahead of the previous version, but we hope it fully catches up with the Windows version.

OneNote for Mac

There aren't many changes in the version of OneNote included with the Office 2016 preview from the free Mac version Microsoft released last year – that's already had updates like being able to copy text out of images (the OneNote engine in the cloud automatically OCRs them). It now has the same sharing features as the other Office 2016 programs in the top right corner. That may be why you can still only save notebooks onto OneDrive in OneNote for Mac (currently it's only your personal OneDrive, but OneDrive for Business support is on the way).

On Windows, it's only the free OneNote that has this limitation – if you pay for OneNote as part of Office 2013, you can save notebooks on your local PC or on a network server (or even an external drive, if you want to archive them). On the Mac, you have to put OneNote notebooks in the cloud – that's the easiest way to make sure you can access them on every device, and if you put them in the cloud you get the image OCR, but some people might prefer the option of keeping notebooks inside the company.

The desktop Windows OneNote does its own image OCR, along with indexing the audio of recordings to make them searchable – it makes more sense for Microsoft to write that functionality once for the cloud and have it available on phones and tablets as well, rather than rewrite it for the Mac as well. But this means it's less likely that saving notebooks on your own Mac will ever be possible.

You can password protect sections, as in OneNote for Windows, and you can apply tags to your notes. But while you'll see custom tags that you've created in OneNote for Windows in your notes, they don't get added to the list of tags so you can't apply them to new notes (you can't even copy them to reuse). You don't get the screen clipper from the Windows version, or the ability to print documents into a notebook, but there is a nice web clipper in Safari for grabbing and saving useful information.

Microsoft does keep adding features, but again, there are many other advanced features from OneNote for Windows that you don't get on the Mac, from recording audio or video that's time-coded to your notes, through to linking a note to a document or web page, and seeing recent edits, translating text into different languages or even checking your spelling.

Early verdict

This is obviously still a preview release. A few features in the applications just aren't implemented yet and when you try to use them you get a dialog warning you of that. The first time we opened a large document in Word it crashed very quickly (although we didn't have any other issues and we didn't lose any data).

Performance is generally good, although some things are slower than Windows Office users will be used to – the red underline for misspelled words doesn't appear nearly as quickly. It's the missing features rather than any performance or stability issues that would keep Office 2016 from being your daily driver. What's not clear is how many more of the features that are in Office 2013 and Office 2016 will come to the Mac when Office 2016 ships.

Microsoft isn't yet talking about when that will be or how much Office 2016 will cost. It will certainly be available as part of Office 365 and if you have an Office 365 tenant that includes the Office clients or Software Assurance for Office, then you'll get the new version as part of that. It's possible that Microsoft will add extra features for a Pro version on the Mac and sell something similar to the preview as Office for Mac Home and Student, but that might have to wait till more of the missing Windows features show up – and may depend on whether Mac users want that extra power.

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