Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows review: Not much to see here

Some of my earliest memories of using a proper computer were in Microsoft Office, and since those heady days of the early 1990s, I’ve spent probably more time using Office apps than I have anything else.

I’m not the only one who has spent more time than is healthy using Microsoft Office, though – it has been used by businesses across the world as the primary tool for productivity for nigh-on 20 years. That’s why, with the launch of Office 2016, the news that not an awful lot has changed shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.

The biggest change you’ll see in Office 2016 is that it’s received a fresh lick of paint, with all the various apps gaining toolbars coloured in their signature livery. Most of the apps (but not all, strangely) have been made more searchable via the new “Tell Me” feature, but aside from those trivial changes, all the suite has gained across all its apps is smattering of small additions.

You can read the full details of what’s new in our Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote reviews further down this article:

• Microsoft Word 2016 review

• Microsoft Excel 2016 review

• Microsoft Outlook 2016 review

• Microsoft OneNote 2016 review

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 review

Suffice it to say, however, there’s no dramatic Windows 10-style overhaul, not even any eye-catching voice recognition fanciness to get excited about in this edition.

Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows: The future

Why might this be? Primarily, it’s because Office doesn’t need an awful lot of work. Aside from Outlook, perhaps, all the apps deliver – as they always have – more features than most users know what to do with, and they do their job well. Many workers rely on specific features of Word, Excel and PowerPoint to carry out their jobs, and there is nothing else on the market that can rival its apps for sheer power and breadth of features.

Another reason is because the device landscape is shifting dramatically, and Microsoft is rightly focussing more of its attention on getting its mobile apps working well on tablets and other mobile platforms. The advent of the Apple iPad Pro is a signal that Microsoft cannot rely on traditional PC and laptop platforms to deliver a steady stream of users forever.

Perhaps the biggest change, however, is the shift away from one-off perpetual licenses for major, business-critical software like Office to subscription-based solutions. With Microsoft now firmly focussed on its Office 365 subscribers, who receive the Office 2016 update for “free” (along with all other future updates), it’s perhaps understandable that the firm is less interested in delivering a big splash of features every three years or so, and more in delivering a steady stream of improvements.

That’s fine for those who have already bought into the Office 365 way of doing things, and there are plenty of reasons for taking on a subscription, not least the ability to install Office on multiple machines for £8 per month.

However, for anyone who doesn’t need that, this brave new world isn’t good news. There’s no getting away from the fact that Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows is a damp squib from a new features point of view, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend you upgrade to Office 2016 as a standalone product from Office 2013.

There simply isn’t enough new here to justify a spend of £120 (for the Home and Student edition). You’re better off waiting for the next release (if there ever is one) or biting the bullet and jumping on the subscription bandwagon.

Microsft Word 2016 for Windows review 

Word is one of the core Office applications, and users spend a lot of time in it. That means details matter, and the new “Colorful” theme is an improvement over the washed-out look of Office 2013.

There are also new features. Word is one of the applications to get the “Tell Me” lightbulb above the ribbon, and it works well as a quick way of finding features without having to hunt through the various ribbon tabs. You can do a word count, for example, by typing Alt+Q to focus on Tell Me, then typing “word count” and pressing Enter. Even better, next time you type Alt+Q, your previous selection pops up by default, further speeding your work. Some users will prefer to use the mouse, but if you like to keep your fingers on the keyboard this works well.

The big new feature in Word 2016 is real-time co-authoring, which works in conjunction with Office 365 or OneDrive. Once you have saved a document to one of these locations, you can click the Share button at the top-right and select or type an email address. The recipient gets a link to the document, and, provided they use either Word 2016 or Office Web Apps, they can edit the document, with changes showing up for all co-authors as they type. In practice, there is a short delay, but this feature is technically impressive.

It is not the first time Word has had collaboration built in, but this version is more dynamic, with changes appearing as they are typed rather than as they are saved. The one catch is that you have to use Microsoft’s cloud – an on-premises SharePoint server is not enough, and currently, it doesn’t appear to be bug-free. I saw occasional glitches appear as I was testing the software, such as a document that should have been shareable raising the mysterious error: “Sorry, something is preventing us from sharing this.”

Another Word enhancement is called Smart Lookup. This is a right-click option for highlighted text, and replaces “Search with Bing” in Word 2013. Type “Ada Lovelace”, for example, perform a Smart Lookup, and an Insights panel opens with a picture and biographical information. In the end it’s just a web search, and searching in a web browser gives richer results, but having information in a panel within Word makes it easier to use the information while you type.

Equation editors can be fiddly to use, so mathematical tablet users may like the new “Ink to Math” converter, which opens an input panel where you can handwrite an equation. This attempts to read your equation, and once you have it right, you can insert it into your document. I had some difficulty getting the editor to recognize my sigmas and round brackets, but it recognised most of my other symbols without a problem.

You may correctly conclude from the above that Word 2016 lacks a host of new features, particularly if real-time co-authoring is not something you need. In reality, the upgrade is a hard sell to customers with existing perpetual licenses.

On the other hand, an increasing proportion of Office customers have subscriptions, and for them the upgrade comes at no additional cost. Microsoft’s Office VP Kirk Koenigsbauer, in his post about the new release, notes: “Going forward, Office 365 customers will now enjoy new features and capabilities delivered continuously in the Office desktop applications as part of their subscription.” So there may be more to come before Office 2019 rolls out – if indeed there is another major release, as opposed to incremental updates.

Microsoft Excel 2016 review

Microsoft’s spreadsheet and data analysis tool is the jewel in Microsoft’s Office crown. It’s a behemoth, an application so widely used, and so far in front of its competition, that it doesn’t need a big boost to its capabilities – a fine-tuning is all that’s really required.

And that’s what it gets in the 2016 release of Office 2016 for Windows. It misses out on the real-time collaboration features found in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, but gains a new appearance, which is nice but not necessary, plus a scattering of welcome enhancements.

The new features start with six new chart types:

• Treemap, which shows hierarchical data as nested rectangles

• Sunburst, which shows hierarchical data as concentric rings

• Waterfall, which uses floating columns to show how changes between full columns are comprised

• Histogram – a statistical chart showing data distribution

• Pareto, which combines columns with lines to show both individual and cumulative values

• Box and Whisker, which shows a range of values with the average values in a box, while lines are drawn at either end to show maximum and minimum values.

The beauty of Excel’s charts is the ease with which they can be created and modified, and the new chart types are very welcome. There’s a new Forecast Sheet wizard that automates building a sheet that forecasts data based on an existing series. It is supported by an enhanced FORECAST function.

Excel’s powerful PivotTables tool is also improved in this release. A pivot table lets you analyse data by having Excel perform sums, counts and averages according to the columns you select, and cross-tabulate one set of data with another. Excel 2016 adds features including automatic relationship detection and automatic time grouping, drill-down buttons that let you zoom in and out of data, and delayed updating so you can make several changes before Excel calculates the results.

The Power Query add-in, used for connecting to data from a variety of sources, is now built into Excel, integrated into the Data ribbon. And 3D maps, an add-in previously known as Power Maps, is also now part of the main product, provided you activate the Data Analysis add-in.

There’s a hatful of smaller improvements, too. When you insert a photographic image into Excel it picks up on the orientation information held in the EXIF data – and rotates the photo accordingly. You also get the “Tell Me” feature, as found in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. Hit Alt+Q (the quickest way to access the feature) and you can search for tools and functions by keyword.

This doesn’t work quite as well as you might expect it to. In fact, it works best if you already know Excel. For example, typing “set a heading row” into the new wizard yields nothing helpful, but typing “freeze panes” brings up the option to freeze the top row. And it only searches through menu and Ribbon bar tools, not Excel’s functions.

If you use Office 365 or SharePoint, you can now access document history from within Excel. The File History panel shows previous versions, and by selecting a version you can preview and restore it. Excel also benefits from the Ink to Math equation editor, as found in Word.

Just as with Word, there’s nothing significant about the upgrades to Excel in this release, but most of them are usable whether you buy a perpetual license or plump for Office 365, and everything is nicely implemented. Excel is the Office application that its competitors find hardest to match. It combines deep features with usability and a clean user interface more successfully than the other Office applications, provides businesses with tools that have become indispensable for many, and it remains the spreadsheet application to beat.

Microsoft Outlook 2016 review

Outlook is Microsoft’s email and calendaring application and the client for Exchange and Office 365. Although it supports generic POP3 or IMAP mail servers, it has always worked best with Exchange, and always will do.

Outlook does a great job of integrating email, contacts, calendar and tasks, but has long suffered from an over-complex user interface and has plenty of long-standing annoyances.

Outlook uses embedded Word as the email editor, for example, and a side-effect is poor rendering of HTML emails and difficult formatting if you want to intersperse your reply with quotes from the message you’ve received.

Little has changed in the Office 2016 release, but on the plus side there are a few new features. The most interesting of these includes the sending and sharing of attachments. When you attach a document stored in Office 365 or OneDrive to an email, for instance, Outlook sends a link to that document by default, instead of attaching the file. Unless you adjust the permissions, documents sent in this way also give editing permissions to the recipient. This is great for collaboration, provided users understand what is happening. If you don’t want to do it the new way, you can send cloud documents with view-only links, or as traditional attachments – and if you select a document stored on your PC, it’s attached in the normal way.

There are also a couple of new features that are really part of Office 365, but which are now also in Outlook. One is the Clutter folder, intended for messages that are low priority, as distinct from junk mail. Clutter depends on learning algorithms implemented in Office 365, but it also shows up in Outlook now and if you come across a message you think the algorithm has missed, you can choose “Move to Clutter” from a right-click message menu. This not only moves the message across to the Clutter bucket, but also helps to improve the accuracy of the service. You still need to visit the Office 365 site to turn Clutter on or off, however.

The other new Office 365 feature is Groups, for which you need an Enterprise subscription. A Group is, effectively, an enhanced mailing list, and one restricted to members of your organisation. You can send emails to the group, but you also get a shared calendar and a document storage area for basic collaboration. Old-style contact groups are still available as well.

If you don’t use Office 365, there isn’t much new other than the new look, which applies throughout the suite, and the Tell Me feature for searching for commands or help. Since Outlook has many buried options, Tell Me has potential. One example of this is if you’re writing an email and want to add someone to the bcc (blind copy) list, or change the From address. Outlook hides these options by default, and you need to click the Options tab and show the fields before you can use them. Now, you can click Tell Me, type bcc, hit Enter, and the option appears.

Microsoft says it has improved Outlook search to make it faster and more reliable, and another change is aimed at users with tablets or notebooks with small capacity SSDs, and lets you reduce the amount of mail stored locally to as little as three days.

Outlook has succeeded in its main job over the years – despite its quirks – as a communication centre and personal information manager, so users have generally learned to live with it. Nonetheless, it’s disappointing that so little has been done to improve what is a core part of Office 2016. With former Acompli CEO Javier Soltero having taken over as Corporate VP for Outlook – Acompli being the company responsible for the mobile versions of Outlook – I hope he can bring usability improvements to the desktop product.

Microsoft OneNote 2016 for Windows review

Microsoft’s OneNote is a relative newcomer to Microsoft Office, but it has still been around since 2003. It was designed with tablets in mind, the idea being that you could write and draw in OneNote as well as type, and you can still do that today.

OneNote content is stored in notebook files, and you can save these either locally or in cloud storage. Cloud storage is normally preferred, since it enables syncing across all your devices, including mobile, with clients available for iOS and Android as well as Windows Phone.

The Office 2016 version of OneNote is essentially the same as OneNote 2013, although with the more colourful look and removal of all caps menus as in the rest of the suite. Bizarrely, however, it does not include the Tell Me feature prevalent across the rest of the applications.

Despite the lack of new features in this particular release, there are plenty of things that have happened to OneNote since Office 2013. One handy feature is the ability to send notes by email. The idea here is that you may find something you want to capture in OneNote when the application itself is not to hand. If you send an email to me@onenote.com, the content is sent to a new page in a OneNote notebook stored on OneDrive. You need to set this up by registering the sending email address on onenote.com, where you can also specify the recipient notebook.

Other ways to send content to OneNote include Clipper, a browser link that can capture web pages, and Office Lens, a mobile scanning app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone that can send images captured with your phone’s camera.

Still, OneNote remains Office 2016’s unsung hero, and changes introduced over the years add up to a powerful note-taking system.

One of my favourite features is the audio-recording system, which remains in place here. Start taking notes, hit the record button and the two are, cleverly, linked together as you type. This means you can select a written note and play the recording, or play the recording and see the related written notes highlighted during playback. Irritatingly, its one fault – terribly low recording quality default settings, which in a new install of OneNote 2016 are 12 kbps/16 kHz mono – hasn’t been rectified in OneNote 2016.

And Collaboration in OneNote is crying out for the kind of real-time co-authoring enjoyed by Word and PowerPoint in this release (and by users of Google Drive the world over). You can still work on shared notes, but other users’ changes won’t appear as they type them – you have to wait until they sync, which can take some time.

However, despite the lack of new features, OneNote remains a powerful and flexible note-taking system, and is now well supported across all popular platforms, including the web. The next job, and perhaps one Microsoft ought to have undertaken in Office 2016, is to push users to using it more often than Word, and making more use of its undoubtedly useful toolkit.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 for Windows review

Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation graphics application gets the full Office 2016 treatment in this release, including Tell Me command search and help, a new more colourful appearance by default, Smart Lookup for Bing search results in a panel, and simultaneous co-authoring.

In fact, simultaneous co-editing only works if you’ve saved a presentation to OneDrive or Office 365. As long as that’s been done, you can click the Share button in the top-right of the application window and send an invitation to invite others to edit the document.

The process is far from seamless, though. Once your contact receives the link to the document, the document is opened in Office Web Apps, and if you want to edit the presentation in the desktop app, you have to go click yet another option to finally open ot in PowerPoint. This isn’t the end of the irritations, either, with security warnings first from the browser, and then from PowerPoint, stating “be careful – files from the Internet can contain viruses”, getting in the way.

At this point, all contributors can work simultaneously, although it still isn’t perfect since you don’t see changes until the document is saved.

Moreover, although the process worked when multiple contributors were working on separate slides, it slipped up when we tried amending a bullet point simultaneously. PowerPoint messed up the merge, silently moving some text from one bullet to the next. Users will need to check for issues like this.

Another useful addition is that PowerPoint 2016 benefits from the new chart types introduced with Excel: Treemap, Sunburst, Histogram, Box and Whisker and Waterfall. When you edit chart data, an embedded Excel sheet appears – a good example of the suite components working together as they should.

Tablet and stylus users can use the Ink to Math equation editor, as found in Word and other Office 2016 applications.

That’s it for new features, though, making this yet another application that has received only light changes in Office 2016.

No doubt the PowerPoint team has been distracted by the work carried out on the companion applications in Office Mobile, and in the Mac edition, which was released earlier this year with many improvements.

It’s also worth noting that, since PowerPoint 2013 was introduced, the Office development team hasn’t been idle. Other features, such as screen recording, which lets you make a video by capturing all or part of the screen together with an audio commentary, have been added in recent updates.

On the subject of videos, it’s worth noting that you can export a PowerPoint presentation as a video, recording your narration and even inking and screen pointing, which can then be uploaded to Office 365 or YouTube. This makes PowerPoint, together with a microphone, a handy all-in-one tool for creating and publishing lectures and tutorials.

But PowerPoint has always been a flexible tool for presenters and educators alike. That hasn’t changed in this release, despite the relative paucity of new features, and PowerPoint remains a capable and mature product.