Right now Microsoft is offering a preview of its Office 16 program. I have been using it for a little over a week and have yet to find the need for this upgrade. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good product. I am no longer wearing my business suite and a part of corporate America so the improvements offered are really not strong enough to consider a change.
In my opinion, most of the features for home users are things that should have been released in an upgrade rather than a new version of Office. For example, in the new version the “all white” view may be changed.
Now I was not a fan of having everything all white but I don’t think the changes are anything more than an upgrade they could have made to Office 13 or Office 365.
The default view is now called Colorful. In Word that means the header is blue with the background a light gray. Each Office Program will has its own color header. In the example you can see that Word is blue while Excel is green. Dark Gray is offered as well as the standard White. Perhaps the best part of this is that the word document is now white on a gray background and that does make it easier on the eyes. Click on the images below to see the difference.
Another item that might help an average user is the ability to list your most recent documents in the Quick Access View.
To change the number of documents you may see after Clicking “Open”, follow the directions in the graphic below.
Another improvement that I feel would benefit the average user is another Quick Access addition, this time in Outlook. We have all added attachments to an email but now Outlook has a drop down menu listing the documents you have created and you may quickly choose any one of them. They do not have to be an Office document. As you can see in the graphic below .jpgs are fine. This has already save me time by not having to navigate to the documents in a folder.
Summary
When the trial ends in December, I do not plan on upgrading to Office 2016. As I mentioned in the beginning, if I was still working and collaborating with others, I think the ease of sharing live files and having the ability to work together on a document, presentation or spreadsheet adds enough value to consider this upgrade.
Jim
