I have been writing a lot about productivity applications over the past several weeks. In the most meta way possible, most of the actual "work" I do on my computers these days (especially my portable computers) is in Word, Excel, and OneNote. My primary portable computer, a Microsoft Surface RT, does these three things exceedingly well, but is starting to show its age in a few ways. In addition to that, we're getting close to the end lifecycle of Office 2011 and Office 2013.
The next version of Office for Windows isn't too surprising. It's essentially going to be the same as Office 2013 but with a few more features. From Windows XP, to Vista, to 7, and 8, the overall appearance of the operating system changed significantly, and Office pretty closely followed the design cues set by Windows. Windows 10 keeps the same overall design as Windows 8 and 8.1.
For Windows, there's also the new Modern/Universal applications, which strike me as being almost too little, too late. However, I think what happened there is Microsoft put the Mac team to work on Office for the iPad and Android tablets, as well as (presumably) ultimately the Modern/Universal versions for Windows. It'll be interesting to hear (when Microsoft inevitably announces it) whether or not a new team has been formed to take care of these "mobile" applications, or if Microsoft is still using the MacBU team to develop mobile apps.
On the Mac side, it has been a surprisingly long time since there has been a major release of Office. Office 2011 was released for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 in October 2010. By the release of Office 2016 later this year, five years (approximately) will pave passed, which is longer than it has been between releases of Office in over twenty years. It has been so long that there will just be a few months between the release of Office 2016, and the end of mainstream support for Office 2011. The main reason for the delay is that Microsoft diverted employees from the Office for Mac project to work on iOS and Android applications.
An interesting aspect of this timing is that Office for Mac and Office for Windows will be synchronized on the same version number. What I hope this means is that Microsoft has picked up some more staff to work on Office for mobile devices without having to delay additional releases of Office. Of course, if Microsoft arranges the Office for Mac, Windows, and mobile device teams in the same overall department or organizational unit, hopefully they won't need asynchronous releases in order for the MacBU team to play catch-up with the Windows version.
Office 2016 for Mac itself is interesting. It manages to look very much at home on the platform, while at the same time, looking a little out of place. It's more up-to-date than Office 2008, but a lot of things still look a little bit "off" compared to the much (visually) smaller interface of Office 2013 on Windows. In order for everything to look normal, I need to zoom the document to about 150%. This is pretty typical for Mac OS X. Pages has a huge interface and defaults at a 125% zoom. If you back it down to 100%, the width of the page actually becomes smaller than the default width of the image, although it happily scales back down. Somewhat interestingly, the built in TextEdit application probably looks the best on Mac OS X, in terms of not having an interface that is too big.
Regardless, it's worth looking at Office to see whether or not it can meet my needs. The zoom issue can be overcome, and most documents even manage to look good at 125 or 150%, especially if you're using the "web" view (as I so often am, given that I'm am normally writing for the Internet.) The one and only thing I'd say it lacks that would put a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro above the Surface Pro 3 or XPS 13 is the blog publishing function, which Office for Windows has had since 2007 (or possibly earlier.)
Yes, it's absolutely a spacebar heating level of specific functionality, but it's annoying to see that it persists in the Windows desktop version of Office and that it doesn't get added to either the Web App, any of the mobile apps, or the Mac app.
The actual functionality of Word looks the same as Word 2013 for PC, however it looks better on Mac OS X (it requires 10.10, the current release) than Office 2011 did, and officially adds support for things such as the new window button behaviors for full-screen and minimizing windows, and it also picks up (better?) support for the Retina displays.
One thing that's different from the Windows versions of Office is that there aren't any "more" options on the toolbar. In the Windows version of Office, these appear at the lower-right corner of each section on the ribbon. Also notable is that the sections of the ribbon are not labeled. This may be because the Office for Mac team didn't see the need to muddle the labeling by giving each tab on the ribbon a name, and further potentially compound the issue of what "area" a command is in by adding labels. It will be interesting to see if Office 2016 for Windows follows this trend of removing the names from each group of commands in the ribbon, or if this is something the Office for Mac team did, maybe to save space on the display.
Eventually I found the advanced options I wanted by right-clicking on the image, something that to this day is not exactly a straightforward thing to describe how to do. Although most of what I needed was there, I have yet to find a way to resize an image by a percentage, something I do in Word on Windows on a regular basis. You could probably argue that I should be using a better tool than Word for re-sizing images, but frequently Word is "good enough" and the images are always for the document I put them in. For pictures I'm going to include in documents, resizing images in Word was always my preference because I felt it gave me more flexibility with what the image looked like. This is true both if I'm writing a blog post and if I'm writing something destined for print, where I'll be doing more advanced placement of the images. The good news is that Preview.app has annotation and resizing features built in, so if I know in advance what I'll want (a particular crop, some annotation, and the exact size goal I'm looking at) then I can use that tool to process my images, much like I might have done for some screenshots in Paint.Net on Windows.
SharePoint integration has always sort of been a sticking point for me. Office 2011 has the Microsoft Document Connection tool, and 2016 moves that functionality, for OneDrive, Office 365 (and Office365 for Business) as well as on-premise SharePoint servers directly into the applications themselves. The good thing is that it's now easier and faster to open documents, and you can be sure you're getting the file that was on the server. The bad news is that it's now that much more difficult to bulk-upload or bulk-download the contents of a SharePoint document library on a Mac. There is of course the OneDrive for Business tool, but that's a sync tool, rather than a pure access tool. It's a nuanced distinction, but suffice it to say, part of the reason my documents are in SharePoint is because I don't want them on my local computer. I'll have to go without the ability to randomly put a bulk collection of screenshots into a folder on SharePoint though, because everything else about Office 2016 (or at least Word 2016) is an improvement.
Outlook – if it is the same Outlook that was released last year to Office365 subscribers, isn't much of an improvement. It takes on a lot of the appearance of OneNote for Mac, but felt to me like a reversion in functionality in important ways such as conforming to Mac OS X conventions, and didn't really improve upon what was available in Outlook 2011, which itself isn't really much better to use than Apple's built in Exchange client, spanning Mail.app, Calendar, Contacts, and Notes.
Outlook gains some of the Office 2013 design language, but it is in some ways painfully obvious that it's an update to Outlook 2011. In a few ways, it's actually a regression from Outlook 2011; for example, the green "full-screen" button maximizes the application, but doesn't cause it to enter full screen mode. I can't possibly be alone in 1) wanting Microsoft to have all of its applications behave the same 2) believing that Outlook would make a really good full-screen app.
Of course, because this is an update to 2011, it doesn't gain any of Outlook 2013's neatest functionality, such as replying and forwarding in the main program window. This may be why the Office team chose to make Outlook the one member of the Office 2016 for Mac suite that doesn't respect the Mac OS X standards for its interface widgets, and is just one of many things that annoys me significantly about Outlook on the Mac. While Outlook on Windows gains new functionality and becomes more stable over the years, Outlook on the Mac seems to grow creakier and look less relevant with age. Mail.app may not be the best e-mail program ever, but it's likely going to be a better Exchange client than Outlook is, and anything you can't do in Apple's applications, you can probably do in Outlook Web Access, and were probably going to need to go use a Windows PC or a terminal server to do anyway.
OneNote on the Mac just continues to be great. I love the fact that it exists, and in the time since its introduction and this writing, it has gained a lot of functionality. You need to pay for an Office365 subscription to use it with notebooks stored in an on-premise SharePoint server (which is, as with the Office for iPad apps, extremely counter-intuitive, but my guess is that Microsoft can't think of any better way to monetize that particular feature for Mac users. It's not completely unreasonable, because you might have gotten the rest of the Office suite through Office365, but it's a bummer for a small group of people.
There's some functionality missing, by sheer nature of the fact that Mac OS X doesn't have or expect certain types of situations to arise, but it's one of the most faithful reproductions of Office on Windows, but on a Mac.
At the end of the day, what I wanted to write about was whether or not Office 2016 (at least as it stands at the moment) changes anything and could I buy a Mac and use it as my writing computer. I applaud Microsoft's efforts and it is (as always) a huge improvement over Office 2011 on the Mac. It's far too early to say whether or not it's as good as Word 2013 for my day-to-day use. Even if Office 2016 improves the Office situation on the Mac, there's still the problem of Mac OS X itself, and the question of whether or not Apple builds hardware that I really want to use at this point. All of that aside, if I did run out and buy a MacBook I'd almost certainly spend a fair amount of time using Remote Desktop to actually post whatever it is I write, so although Office 2016 may convince some people to switch entirely, I still need spacebar heating.