Last Updated: October 29, 2018 Important Update: has now been released. We strongly recommend upgrading to Office 2019 as it fixes many of the problems users commonly experience in Office 2016. If you’re having problems with Office 2016 for Mac especially Outlook 2016 crashes, Word 2016 crashing or Office 2016 crashing in Sierra or High Sierra, here’s a comprehensive list of solutions to repair Office 2016 on Mac. If you need a quick fix or are in a hurry, remember that if you’ve got an, you can use the online version of Office 2016 until you’ve managed to fix the desktop version of Office 2016 on your Mac. If you’re desperate to open your Outlook mails but can’t because Outlook keeps crashing, you may also find our guide on useful too. You May Also Like:. With this in mind, here’s a list of 13 ways to fix Office 2016 for Mac when it keeps crashing.
Run Microsoft AutoUpdate One thing you can guarantee with Microsoft software on Apple products is that there will always be glitches and problems, particularly when it comes to a huge office suite like Office. Most of the problems Mac Office users have regard various types of Outlook and Word crashes on Mac especially Outlook 2016 crashing on startup or hanging. Microsoft has already issued fixes for some of these via so we recommend you run that first by opening any Microsoft Office program, going to the Help Menu at the top of the screen and selecting “Check for Updates”. Likewise, Apple has also issued updates for El Capitan users which you can get by opening the Mac App Store and clicking on the Updates button at the top of the screen.
If you’re having problems with Office 2011 crashing in El Capitan, we also show you how to fix Office El Capitan problems in the 2011 version. We’ve attempted to address all of the most common Office 2016 for Mac crashes here but if we’ve missed anything, let us know in the comments and we’ll try to help. This article starts with Outlook fixes and then moves on to Word so scroll down if it’s just Word 2016 you’re having problems with. The other important thing to note is that Office 2016 for Mac only works with OS X 10.10 Yosemite or higher – it does not work with OS X 10.9 Mavericks or lower so make sure you are definitely running OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS 10.13 High Sierra before proceeding. Before trying any of these fixes, we also recommend uninstalling any anti-virus software you may be using on your Mac. And in particular can sometimes conflict with apps and for those on enterprise networks, we also recommend uninstalling and if you’re running them and then try opening Office 2016 on Mac again.
Rebuild Office 2016 For Mac Database In Office 2011, a common way to fix this was to rebuild the Office 2011 database (also known as creating a new identity). However, Microsoft has removed this feature in Office 2016 for Mac claiming Office 2016 for Mac will only prompt you to rebuild the database if it encounters a problem but this doesn’t always work anyway and you risk losing all of your mail if it doesn’t repair properly: The way round this is to create a new Profile in Office 2016 for Mac instead (previously called an “Identity” in Office 2011). Note that if you use Microsoft Exchange, creating a new profile will delete any data that has not yet been synchronized with Exchange including contacts so it’s advisable to backup any local data in Outlook on your Mac. Here’s how to create a new identity in Office 2016 using El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra:. Open your Applications folder and find Microsoft Outlook.
Feb 05, 2016 There is now Office 2016 (which is for Windows) and Office 2016 for Mac. The Mac version has feeble support for VBA, though it is gradually improving with every update. You'll have much better luck with Office 2011, which has 99% of VBA supported. Made with Mac in mind, Office 2016 for Mac gives you access to your favorite Office applications - anywhere, anytime and with anyone. Includes new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. See what's new in Office 2016. Your school may offer Office 2016 for Mac for free. Search for your school below to claim this academic deal.
Hold down the CTRL key and then click on Microsoft Outlook to see the contextual menu and select “Show Package Contents”. In the Contents SharedSupport folder, double-click on Outlook Profile Manager (which was previously called Database Utility in Office 2011). In the Outlook Profile Manager window, click on the (+) button to give the new profile a name.
Finally, click the Options button and click Set as Default You can also try this for Office 2011 although it seems less likely to work regarding problems with El Capitan. In Outlook 2011, you simply hold down the Option key when launching Outlook to open the Database Utility to create a new Identity (now called “Profiles” in Office 2016). Outlook 2016 Crashes Sending Mail If you’re finding that Outlook 2016 is crashing or freezing every time you try to send mail or Outlook 2016 for Mac won’t send email, then the easiest solution is simply to create a second identical Outlook account and then delete the first one. Here’s how to add a new account or profile in Outlook 2016. On the setup page, click Add Account.
Or you can click the Tools tab at the top of Outlook and click on Accounts: The Outlook 2016 account wizard will then start:. Select Add Account and then the account type you want – either Exchange or Office 365 to add your email account. Click Other Email to add your personal email account such as Outlook web account, Gmail, Yahoo mail etc. Enter your account information and click Add Account. Click the “configure automatically” check box at the bottom which will automatically enter the right technical details for your account.
If this doesn’t work however, you can enter the details manually for an Outlook account using the details below. For Gmail and other providers, you’ll have to Google for the right details:. Fields IMAP Incoming server imap-mail.outlook.com Port for the incoming server 993 Outgoing server smtp-mail.outlook.com Port for the outgoing server 587 You then simply import all of your mail from your old account into the new one. To do this you go back to the new account wizard but instead of clicking Add Account, you click Import instead. You then simply select the Outlook account on your Mac to import and all your data will be transferred automatically.
You can delete the old account in account manager but we strongly advise making a backup of it before doing so. Outlook 2016 Crashes On Startup If you find that Outlook keeps crashing when you try to open it or keeps giving you an “Office 365 Active Subscription” error message, the solution is to delete the Outlook 2011 preferences file from your current installation of Outlook on your Mac. Don’t worry, this won’t affect Outlook 2011 when you want to go back to it – it will continue to work as normal. Search for Terminal on your Mac by going to the spyglass in the top right corner and searching for “Terminal”: 2.
In terminal type: defaults delete com.microsoft.Outlook and press Enter: 3. Then type: killall cfprefsd to kill the cached preferences and press Enter: 4. Relaunch Outlook and you should find it works again. If you were attempting to import an Outlook 2011 PST file before the crash and Outlook prompts you to import again, you can skip it because the PST will already have been imported previously.
If your mail isn’t there, go to File – Import and then browse to your Outlook 2011 PST file. This fix will also start syncing Outlook 2016 with Office 365 and you should start to see your calendar and other data synchronizing. Outlook 2016 With Exchange Errors If you’re having problems adding an Exchange account to Outlook 2016 then it’s probably because your version of Exchange is not supported. The error message will usually be something like: The data contains an exchange 2010 SP1 or older account or EXCBADACCESS or error -3253 Connection to the server failed or was dropped Office 2016 For Mac only supports Exchange 2010 SP2 or higher – meaning you’ll have to upgrade Exchange if you’re still using Exchange 2010 SPP1 or Exchange 2007. Update Microsoft Error Reporting If you’ve just upgraded to Office 2016 on your Mac, you also need to make sure that Microsoft Error Reporting is updated to at least version 2.2.9.
If not, the older version of Microsoft Error Reporter will keep conflicting with Outlook 2016 and make it crash. To update, simply go to the Apple logo in the top left corner of your Mac and select “Software Update” and install the available updates. Outlook Hangs Or Crashes Importing PST Files This is unfortunately a recurring problem with Outlook on Mac. Large PST files, especially those more than a few GB, tend to send Outlook into a tailspin. The best advice is to go away and have a cup of tea and leave Outlook to get on with it as it can take a long time.
However, if you eventually end up with this message: Outlook has encountered a problem and needs to close Sometimes the solution for this is to download the latest update to Outlook or Office for Mac. However, since no updates are available yet for Office 2016 for Mac, there’s not much you can do until Microsoft issue one.
If you haven’t already, you can try by going to Account Settings – Data Files and Compact Files. There are also some third party apps that split PST files but they only work on PC. Outlook 2016 Won’t Import Rules From Windows Office 2016 on Mac seems to have a problem importing rules from Outlook for Windows. Unfortunately, there’s no solution for this other than to enter them manually but you can speed things up by using 2016.
Outlook Won’t Sync With Outlook.com, iCloud etc Unfortunately Outlook 2016 won’t sync Contacts and Calendars with Outlook.com, iCloud or Gmail. This is because Outlook for Mac still does not support CalDAV or CardDAV (although ). This is a known that Microsoft are aware of but it remains to be seen whether it will be fixed in the final release. These are the most common Outlook 2016 crashes on Mac but here are a few other Office 2016 for Mac problems you may be struggling with. OneDrive For Business Document Cache Error If you’re using Office 2016 with OneDrive For Business and are receiving the error: A problem occurred while accessing the office document cache. Do you want to repair this problem? Whether you choose to try and repair the problem or not, you’ll probably find that OneDrive For Business will then hog your Mac’s CPU and crash.
To fix this, you must simply delete your OfficeFileCache. Close OneDrive For Business 2.
Go to: /Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Microsoft/AppData/Microsoft/Office/15.0/OfficeFileCache If you have trouble finding it, the easiest way is to go to Finder and select Go in the Menu Bar, hold down the ALT key and you will see the Library folder appear: 3. When you’ve found the OfficeFileCache file, delete it, restart OneDrive For Business and it should work. How To Fix Word 2016 Crashes If you’ve been having problems with Word 2016 crashing on your Mac, then there’s actually a simple solution to fix most of them.
There are a variety of problems and issues in Office 2016 For Mac that mean Word 2016 keeps crashing, some with error messages and others that just display the spinning beach ball of death and require you to Force Quit. Some people find that simply selecting or editing text in Word 2016 makes it freeze and crash while for others it won’t launch or startup. The frustrating thing for Mac users is that many of these bugs didn’t affect the Preview version of Office 2016 For Mac and only started to emerge once the final version was released. The solution usually involves updating Word via Microsoft Update but it depends on the type of problems you are experiencing.
If Word freezes or crashes when opening a file and you’re getting the message: “Unexpected critical error: Can’t open program”: Or if you’re seeing a “Can’t load Visual Basic For Applications” error: Or if you’re experiencing an error a few minutes after starting it such as this “Microsoft Word has encountered a problem and needs to close” error then there a few ways to fix all of these problems. The first and most common solution is to run Microsoft AutoUpdate from within Office 2016 for Mac. Simply go to the “Help” menu and then select “Check For Updates” and many of the issues have already been solved by Microsoft. This cause of the bugs usually range from simple conflicts with other applications to an inability of Word to open diacritic accent characters and degree symbols in the names of files (basically unusual, non-standard or Chinese characters or letters) which Word 2016 can’t handle in certain cases. Some crashes are also due to corrupted template or preferences files which if not solved via software update, can be fixed by creating a new user profile.
Finally, some bugs are simply due to trying to directly open Word files from online storage solutions such as Dropbox. If this doesn’t work for you and you find that Word still crashes when you try to open a document, try opening Word first and then opening the file in it rather than double clicking on a file to open it.
This simple workaround seems to have worked for some users at least. If you’re experiencing crashes when selecting “Save” or “Save As” and are using a developer preview of OS X 10.11 El Capitan, then simply update the developer preview to the latest version and the bug should be fixed. If none of this works and you desperately need to edit a Word document to meet a deadline, we strongly recommend using Apple’s equivalent of Word which is Pages and can open Word.docx documents. Alternatively check out our article on the. Will Office 2016 Copy Over Office 2011? You can safely install Office 2016 and it will not copy over or mess-up your Office 2011 files.
Office 2011 uses a different location for files: /Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities while Office 2016 Preview uses /Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/ 13. If You Still Haven’t Found A Solution Microsoft claims to be aware of the problems with Office 2016 for Mac and has promised to issue fixes soon. However, if you can’t wait until then, we recommend contacting or you can report problems from within Office 2016. If you’re experiencing regular crashes in Office 2016, it helps if you paste in the the crash stack or error report so that Microsoft can pinpoint the exact problem. If you don’t get an error report because Outlook or Office just freezes or hangs, go to your Applications folder and open Activity Monitor and then take a snapshot of a Sample Process by selecting the small Settings cog at the top of the Activity Monitor window: You can also give feedback to Microsoft from within Office 2016 by selecting the small smiley face in the top right corner and explaining your problem or pasting in any crash reports or logs that you have. Conclusion If none of these fixes repair Office 2016 on your Mac and remember that if you have a, you can check your mail using the. One last word of advice.
If you need a reliable long term backup solution to problems with Office on your Mac, the only other solution is to and install Microsoft Office 2016 on that. It’s a bit of hassle to install and setup but nowadays you can. If however Office 2016 for Mac crashes all the time and you’ve simply had enough of Microsoft products, here we show you how to completely. We hope these tips have helped you stop Outlook 2016 and Word 2016 from crashing on your Mac. If you’re struggling with other bugs or problems with Office 2016 For Mac or, let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to help. Todd After posting, I created a new Outlook 2016 profile and tried to import the Outlook 2011 profile again.
One of my two Exchange accounts triggered a pop-up that stated it was 2010 SP1 and therefore would not allow me to connect to Exchange after import (which aligns with your question). I am now exporting that old archive e-mail and will create a new Outlook 2011 profile with MSDB utility for the “good” Exchange account so that is at 2010SP2 as the only account inside it. I will try to import it again and see if the trouble goes away. The interesting issue is that I was able to go through this exercise at initial installation and even connect to the 2010SP2 Exchange account without issue.
It downloaded and synchronized all e-mail, events, and contacts. However, after closing/restarting the application, “something” continues to overwrite the server URL in the configuration. I wonder if it is reading that older SP1 MSE account and that’s what is overwriting the configuration.
I never saw the older MSE account in the import and never configured it “not” as default. Todd Update on my previous post: Outlook 2016 continues to change the URL of the Exchange server from what I need it to be to a default of “This prevents my Outlook client from connecting properly. I write in the proper URL and Outlook overwrites it. I don’t have this problem from Outlook 2011. I have tried net new installations and imports of 2011 identities (clean or otherwise). If a company doesn’t use the default Exchange server format (due to security or other reasons), this apparently is an issue.
Todd That’s what I am finding out. Not being an MS Exchange & Outlook expert, I am curious as to what communications take place between client & server that might be overwriting this configuration. It definitely has a bit to do with whether or not your MSE server is patched to SP2 as it’s part of the import process when pulling in older identities.
Part of the import process qualifies what it wants to import and whether or not it is allowed or will impact the ability to connect to the MSE server. SP2 is required to connect as you guys have documented nicely. Andrew I’m experiencing a TON of crashes. Outlook seems to crash a lot when I’m sending mails, not so much when opening and rarely/never when receiving. There’s a lot of randomness to the crashes. It’s not certain addresses, or certain sizes, no association to attachments or after sending a certain number or messages or after a certain amount of time.
The first release of the beta worked great, it’s gone downhill sense. Also, is there ANY way to locally archive mail? My mailbox is getting very large and we don’t have the ability to turn on the online archiving feature. My total size is about 1.9GB. Shane Just wanted to point out that your article is somewhat incorrect/incomplete when stating that you need to check for updates via Apple Software Update. OneNote is available and can be updated via the Mac App Store but Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook have never been available in the Mac App Store.
Also note, that if you installed Microsoft Office 2016 then version of OneNote installed with that, along with all of the other Microsoft Office 2016 applications will need to be updated by going to HelpCheck For Updates in any of the Microsoft Office applications. Doing this will open the Microsoft AutoUpdate utility to perform the updates. Sue I am having a problem with newer versions: the installed Word for Mac 2016 v. 15.4 shuts down abruptly as I edit a document. My iMac is new and running High Sierra 10.13.1. My other problem is drifting — that is, the document shifts around, especially from side to side either by itself or when I’m trying to navigate up and down in a document. This happens with my old plug in mouse from 2008 and my new rechargeable Mighty Mouse 2.
I’m a writer, and what I need is reliability and the ability to write, share, edit and save — not a multitude of features I’ll never use. My 2008 iMac running word 2004 worked so much better. You seem to really know Macs and MS. Any suggestions? Lyn I installed Office 2016 Home & Student edition last week.
Everything was working fine and late last week every time I opened it there was a new update. It is now fully up to date after four days of updates, but today when I open Word it works for about 2 minutes and then crashes. No error report. Just shuts down.
I have searched for a solution and tried everything suggested on the Microsoft Answers page – there was a suggestion changes to the Normal.dotm template (by adding words to the custom dictionary or defining Auto Text entries) made the program unstable – but even removing the Normal template did’t fix the problem. I’m now at my wits end.
I have to use Word for compatibility with people I’m working with who are PC users. Files are stored on my Mac hard drive. I am using Word v.16.14.1 (180613). My operating system is Mac OS High Sierra v.10.13.5 I only upgraded to 2016 when I received a Mac generated message that 32-bit software wouldn’t be supported from August and so I had to ensure I was using something upgradable to 64 bit – which was Office 2016. I am worried about deleting it and reinstalling because I only have a licence to use it on one machine and I’m sure MS will say I’m trying to install it on another machine ? I don’t want to use 365 I’m totally over it and don’t know what else to try ?.
Mac users of Office who have felt left out in the cold by Microsoft (because the last version, Office 2011 for Mac, was released in October 2010) now have reason to be pleased: The final version of brings the suite out of the dark ages and into the modern world. Hints of what the new Office would offer have been out for quite a while, notably, introduced in October 2014. But Mac owners had to wait until early July for the final release of the full suite, including the core applications Word, PowerPoint and Excel. It was well worth the wait.
Office 2016 for Mac sports a far better interface than Office 2011, integrates well with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and dramatically improves Outlook. Further reading: (Note: Mac for Office 2016 requires Yosemite OS X or better. It’s currently only available as part of a, which allows you to install Office on multiple devices. It will sell as a standalone Mac product later this month.) Spanking new interface The moment you run any Office application, you know you've left the aging Office 2011 behind. It's less cluttered, cleaner and sleeker-looking, more logically organized, more colorful and simpler to use. That's largely in part because the Ribbon has been redone, and now looks and works as it does in the Windows version of Office. The Ribbon is far more prominent and now sits close to the top of the screen rather than (as before) beneath a long row of icons for doing things such as opening and closing files, printing and so on.
The usual Mac menu that sits atop Mac applications is hidden as well, although you can reveal it by moving your cursor to the top of the screen. It's a clever way to bridge the worlds of Office and Mac OS X. Not everyone is a Ribbon fan, though, and those who wish it were gone, or just want to give themselves a little more screen real estate, can hide it by clicking a small up arrow at the Ribbon's far right. The Ribbon goes away and the arrow turns to face downwards. Click the arrow to make the Ribbon come back. Not only has the Ribbon been moved but it's been reorganized, which is all to the good.
For example, Word's confusing Document Elements tab is gone; most of what was there can now be found in the more logically-named Insert tab. So now, you use the Insert tab when you want to insert anything, whether it be art, a table, header, link and so on.
In Office 2011 you had to go on a treasure hunt through many different tabs to find all that. You'll find similar reorganizations throughout all of Office. For me, this reorganized Ribbon has made Office more usable and far more pleasurable to use than the previous version. Also, I use the Windows version of Office, and because the Mac version now closely mirrors it, I found switching between Office on Windows and Office on the Mac to be largely seamless. Standardized look and feel In Office 2016, Microsoft is bringing a common look and feel to the suite across all platforms, which is why this Mac version looks much like the recently released Windows-based.
However, there are still some differences between the Mac version and the Windows Office preview. As with the Windows 2016 preview, on the Mac the applications are color-coded: Blue for Word, green for Excel and red for PowerPoint.
Also missing in the Mac version is one of the more useful features of the Windows version: A box on the far right of the ribbon with the text, 'Tell me what you want to do.' Type in a task, and you get walked through doing it via options and menus. I found that exceptionally useful, and hope that Microsoft eventually introduces it in the final, shipping version of Office 2016 for the Mac.
Another difference: The Ribbon doesn't have the File tab. In the Windows version of Office, when you click the File tab, you're sent to what Microsoft calls Backstage, for doing things such as opening a file, viewing cloud-based services associated with your accounts and so on. That's missing in the Mac version.
You can do some of what Backstage offers in the Mac version - for example, you can open files by either clicking on a folder icon just above the Ribbon on the left-hand side of the screen or by pressing the Command-O keyboard combination. But that still won't offer other Backstage capabilities, such as controlling what changes people can make to a document. In the Mac version, you do that in the Review tab. And I couldn't locate two other features of Backstage anywhere in the Mac version of Office: Checking a document to see whether it contains hidden personal information and managing previous versions of a file. It may be that they're hidden so deeply I couldn't find them. But it's a shortcoming of the Mac version of Office, even if it's only a minor one.
Integration with OneDrive Microsoft has been integrating its cloud-based service OneDrive into both Windows and Office, and so, as you would expect, access to OneDrive is built right into Office 16 for the Mac. You have a choice of opening or saving files either to the cloud-based OneDrive or on your Mac's hard disk. It took me a little while to get used to the somewhat confusing OneDrive interface. When you choose File / Open or press Command-O, you see a screen that is clearly designed to be like every other Office screen, with the same colors, size of icons and so on. You then have the choice of opening a file on OneDrive or on your local Mac.
If you choose to open a OneDrive file, you get the same Office-like interface. However, if you choose a Mac-based file, you’re switched to the Mac’s Finder interface and have to use it navigate to files stored on your local version of OneDrive. Using two different interfaces to open files is jarring at first and takes getting used to. However, after a few times I got used to dealing with it.
You likely will as well. Word 2016 As with the other Office applications, the main thing that's new about Word is the interface.
But there are other changes as well. There is now a somewhat awkward collaboration feature that lets two people work simultaneously in the same document. In theory it sounds nice; in practice, I wasn't impressed. You don't see the changes your collaborator makes until she saves the document, and she won't see your changes until you save it.
That's not exactly real-time collaboration. Nice try, but I won't be using the feature any time soon - Google Docs is far superior in this area, because it uses true real-time collaboration. Word and the other Office applications get the full-blown ribbon treatment in Office 16 for Mac.
On the plus side, there's a new Styles pane that lets you apply pre-set styles to text and paragraphs. It's easy to overlook, because it's available only on the Home tab. To use it, go to the Home tab and click the Styles Pane icon on the upper right of the screen - and the pane appears. Click the icon again to make it go away.
Word 2016 also adds another useful new pane, the Navigation pane, which lets you navigate through a document via search results, headings and page thumbnails. You can also navigate by the kinds of changes you've made to the document, such as comments and formatting.
Excel 2016 One of the most welcome additions to Excel is that it now recognizes most Windows keyboard shortcuts. But don't worry - there's no need to abandon the old Mac Excel shortcuts, because it recognizes them as well. Being a long-time Windows Excel user, I found this saved me a great deal of time on the Mac.
It was like coming home. Excel now comes with new data analysis and charting features. Spreadsheet jockeys will be pleased that Excel has been powered with many of the features from the Windows version, such as adding slicers to pivot tables. With slicers, you create buttons that make it easy to filter data in a pivot table report, with no need to resort to drop-down lists. A number of new statistical functions have also been added, such as moving averages and exponential smoothing. Less importantly, when you click on a cell, your cursor essentially glides over to it in an animated way, like it does on the Windows 2013 version of Excel.
Will this change your life? But I found it just the slightest bit entertaining, and I, for one, can use all the entertainment I can get when I'm using a spreadsheet. Not everything is rosy in this new version of Excel, though. You can't build pivot charts in Excel, which is unfortunate, because they're a great way to present complex information at a glance, and are useful when creating dashboards meant to display a great deal of data at once. PowerPoint 2016 PowerPoint has gotten the same kind of collaboration features as Word and suffers from the same limitation - it's not true real-time collaboration because changes don't show up until the person you're collaborating with saves them. The new Presenter view may be PowerPoint's best new feature. On the plus side, I found the new Presenter view an excellent addition.
With it, while you're projecting a presentation, your audience will see the current slide, while you'll also see your notes, the next slide and a timer. That makes it easy to read from your notes and know what's coming next when giving your presentation.
A new animations pane is useful for creating and previewing animations in your presentations. I found it exceptionally useful because it let me control pretty much everything about animations in slides, including customizing the duration of the animation, whether to play sound along with it, and a number of effects options.
And it's also great for adding multiple animations to a slide, because you can use the pane to easily change the order of the animations, delete animations and add news ones. Outlook 2016 If you feel that Apple Mail is purgatory, Outlook 2016 will be a must-have. As with the other applications in Office 2016, Outlook has gotten a visual makeover to make it look and work more like its Windows counterpart. Clutter has been reduced, although it still relies on a menu above the ribbon for many tasks. Outlook has a new look, but more important may be performance enhancements under the hood. Unread messages now are denoted by a blue vertical bar rather than by bold text, making them stand out much more.
As a result, I found it much easier to scan unread mail in my inbox. Links to your calendar, notes, contacts and tasks are no longer buried underneath the mailboxes on the left-hand pane, but instead appear in big type at the very bottom of the screen. They're now impossible to miss.
Performance has been considerably improved. Messages appear instantly, search is quick and I experienced no lags or delays. Microsoft says that's because it's switched from its previous proprietary database to SQLite. The company also says this makes Outlook's database not just faster, but less liable to crashes and corruptions.
You receive messages faster on an Exchange account not just because of the new database, but because in the old Outlook for the Mac, Exchange Web Services polled the mail server for new messages approximately only once a minute. Outlook 2016 has done away with that delay - it now polls continually. That's not to say all is well with this new version of Outlook. You can't export mail, tasks, contacts, notes, and calendars directly from Outlook.
Because there's no support for CalDAV or CardDav, you can't sync your contacts or calendars with other programs and platforms, including Outlook.com. And because Outlook supports Apple's sandbox, you can't run local anti-spam products in Outlook 2016 with Exchange. Instead, you have to use an Exchange server-based anti-spam product from Microsoft.
Subscribe or not? There are currently two versions of Office 2016 for Mac available, both as part of the subscription-based Office 365 line. Office 365 Home costs $9.99 per month and covers up to five Windows PCs or Macs along with five tablets and five phones; Office 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month and covers one Windows PC or Mac, one tablet and one phone. There are also several and plans available. When the standalone version of Office 2016 for Mac is released later this month, it will be essentially the same suite as the Office 365 version, with two differences: The standalone version won’t include either a free 1TB of OneDrive space or 60 minutes a month of free Skype calling, both of which come with Office 365. Aside from that, though, the suites will be identical.
Bottom line With this version of Office, the Mac is no longer the poor stepchild in the Office world. All versions of Office, whether on a Windows PC or a Mac, look and work alike, and also resemble the Office you experience on the Web and on tablets. This is good news for Mac users, because the new interface and features, as well as the improved performance of Outlook, make it a considera.