When I was in college a couple years ago, I used Office for Mac to do all of my research papers, because it saves natively in.docx, the standard file format, unlike the Pages word processor which is bundled with my Mac. I decided to upgrade to Office Home and Student 2016, because there are plenty of new features and improvements over the five year old and antiquated Office 2011 which I used in college.

It is worth the $100 upgrade First, the interface looks almost exactly like the Windows versions of Office. With older Office for Mac versions, buttons were in different places, and the interface was generally clunkier to use than the Windows version.

Applies to: Office for Mac, Office 2019 for Mac, Office 2016 for Mac. Apple has long encouraged application developers to adopt the 64-bit runtime environment, and we've been hearing from customers that 64-bit versions of Office for Mac are desirable to enable larger address spaces, better performance, and new innovative features.

I found I was easily able to use 2016 with no additional training, since I have used Office for many years on Windows PC computers. How to install netbeans 8.2 on mac. However, now on the Mac, you still get the menu bar on the top of the screen, with the 'File', 'Edit', and other commands, which the Windows version no longer has.

In my opinion, this version of Office for Mac is the easiest to use ever, since it has both the ribbon and the menu bar. This version is now almost fully compatible with the Apple Retina MacBook Pros that came out a few years ago. The last version was very blurry on my screen, since the graphics were designed for older lower resolution screens. Not so with this version. For the most part, everything looks clear, although some cursors and buttons still look a little blurry, but its a lot better than Office 2011. Also, Office 2011 had frequent issues with opening documents created on PCs, and this version fixes that. For academic writing, Office 2016 has a better citation manager that lets you use more up to date citation styles.

It's a lot better than RefWorks, or any other web based bibliography program, and its built right into word! I really think Office 2016 is a joy to use, and is a very Mac-like experience for the most part. It's far better than the old Office 2011, which felt like it was designed in the early 1990s.

Pros - Very fluid, Mac-like Office suite - Saves natively in.docx,.xlsx, and.pptx unlike Pages and Keynote - Great citation manager - Fast and easy to use Cons - Requires you to use a web-based conversion service if you want to open.odt documents, which are used frequently if you go to school in Europe or conduct business there. - Installation is a real headache, requires you to create a Microsoft account, and use Firefox instead of Safari to activate Office - High price, but the best Office suite for Mac. One other word of advice: Make sure you buy 'Office Home & Student 2016', and not Office 365. Office 365 is subscription software and expires after a year, so you must buy it again every year. Office Home & Student is perpetual, so you can use it as long as you wish, so it will be cheaper in the long run for you. Ah, to be dealing with Microsoft products again. I just received this product in the key card format.