3aIT Blog

The latest version of Microsoft Office is now available to download for Windows, with the Mac version having already been available for a few weeks.

One of the more obvious new features is search in the ribbon for Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Much like the search in Windows's start bar, you can use keywords here to find what you are looking for rather than hunting for the right button. For example. enter "Spell Check", and you'll be presented with the option to do that.

Other new features include realtime co-authoring, which allows you to collaborate on documents saved with Office 365 or OneDrive. Additionally, Outlook now encourages you to send links to files using OneDrive / Office 365 rather than attachments to save clogging up inboxes.

As you would expect though, there are very few new revolutionary features - especially if you're using Office without an Office 365 subscription. Office is now a very mature product, so there's not a huge amount that Microsoft can usefully add between releases now. Therefore, while there's certainly no need to avoid Office 2016, unless one of the new features will hugely benefit you or your business, there needn't be any rush to upgrade from Office 2010 / 2013.