Microsoft Excel is the industry leading spreadsheet program, a powerful data visualization and analysis tool. Take your analytics to the next level with Excel 2016. Microsoft unveiled Office 2016 for Mac in July 2015. This productivity suite aims to please the legions of Apple Macintosh users who have been clamoring for an update to Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac.

Mac users have always been an important market for Microsoft, especially in the early days of Office. Excel, after all, was one of the original killer apps for the Macintosh, and it's about to celebrate its 30th birthday. Excel for the Macintosh debuted on September 30, 1985, nearly two years ahead of Excel for Windows. That might have been the last time an Office for Mac program was arguably better than its Windows counterpart. In recent years, Office for Windows has been the one that gets all the resources and all the new features first, with the Mac version typically behind by at least a year.

On top of that, most of the team responsible for Office on the Mac has been focused on building Office versions for (released a little over a year ago) and for (released last fall). With Office 2016 for Mac,, Microsoft has finally turned the tables. This version of Office for the Mac is arguably an improvement over its Windows counterpart, at least in some measures.

A complete rewrite This version is a complete rewrite, with the Office for Mac team moving from its legacy (Carbon) codebase to the more modern Cocoa framework. More importantly, it's left the quirkiness of the old Office for Mac behind. I don't expect to hear many complaints from Mac users about Office 2016 for Mac, especially if they've already adapted to the iPad version, which has many similarities with the new Mac release. But the real beneficiaries of the all-new design are people who switch between Macs and PCs regularly. If you fit in that category, you have plenty of company.

According to Microsoft, roughly 75 percent of the Office for Mac customer base is made up of cross-platform users, typically with a Windows PC at work and a Mac at home. I've spent the past few months using the preview release of Office 2016 for Mac and have had the final build for the past few days.

I haven't run screaming from this version of Office--far from it. Office suite for mac one time purchase. Instead, the entire experience feels familiar. I haven't had a chance to do extensive compatibility testing, but so far every Office document I've opened has displayed perfectly. That shouldn't be a surprise; Microsoft's record on 'round trip' document capability has been excellent since the switch to XML-based formats in 2007, across desktop, mobile, and web-based apps. The Mac Ribbon is now nearly identical to its Windows cousin, with a customizable Quick Launch toolbar above it.

Because the feature sets aren't a perfect match, the ribbons aren't completely identical, but the layout and order of tabs is consistent across platforms. To add a table to a Word document, for example, you use the Insert tab, which is always in the second position. See for yourself: That's Office 2013 for Windows on top, Office 2016 for Mac on the bottom. Color coding matches the Windows programs as well, with Word in blue, Excel green, and so on.