Office Home and Business 2013 was designed to help you create and communicate faster, with time-saving features and a clean, modern look across all your programs. Plus, save your documents online in OneDrive to access virtually them anywhere. Microsoft has a known issue of Office 2016 not activating in Mac. I've spent the past two weeks in a nightmare of trying to get Office activated while each of the techs I contact fail with their supposed 'work around' fix while Microsoft engineers try to fix the problem.

If Microsoft were to have a motto for Office 2016, it could well be the old coaching adage 'There is no 'I' in 'team.' The suite offers considerable collaborative and teamwork features that turn Office from a tool for a single person into one that helps people work together. If you work by yourself and will use Office as a standalone product, you'll find far fewer changes from Office 2013. That's not necessarily a bad thing – Office is already so stacked with features that adding new ones just for the sake of it could harm rather than help its usability. How successful has Microsoft been in adding collaboration features? And how useful are the handful of non-collaborative features added to the core of Office?

That's what I'll cover in the rest of this review. Share and share alike The Office suite, particularly Word, has long had the best features of any productivity-tool suite for letting people review each other's documents – I've always thought that its change-tracking, markup and reviewing features were the gold standard for document review. As someone who makes a living as a writer, I can't imagine doing without them. But previous versions of Office fell short in real-time collaboration features that allow people to work on documents simultaneously no matter where they are in the world, as long as they have Internet connections. That all changes with Office 2016. Now you can easily work on a document with other people in real time, as long as the document is stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online.

[ To comment on this story, visit. ] When Office 2016 was released in September 2015, real-time collaboration worked only with Word, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. In July 2017 Microsoft finally made the feature available in Excel as well — but only for Office 365 subscribers who have updated to or later. (At some point Microsoft will roll out the feature to the non-subscription version of Excel, but the company isn’t saying exactly when.) This real-time collaboration works in both home and business versions of Office 2016, although business users have a few extras not found in the home versions, as I'll explain. [ Read more: ] Command central for collaborating is a new Share pane that displays when you click the Share icon in the upper-right part of an Office document that can be shared. From here, you can send an invitation for other people to share your current document and find people with whom you've previously shared and worked on documents. To invite people to share a document, type their email addresses in the 'Invite people' box and select either 'Can edit' or 'Can view' in the drop-down.

If you're on a corporate network and you're using the business version of Office 2016, you can also click the address book icon to choose co-worker email addresses. Then click Share. [ ] The Share pane lets you share files with other people, and lists those who have rights to share the file you're currently working on. When you're working on a document with other people, you'll see a colored cursor in the document where they are working on it. Each person gets their own color. You can see what they do as they do it, including deleting, editing and adding text.

They see what you do as well. Down the side of the pane, you'll see a list of people who have editing access to the document. Those who are currently in the document have a colored bar next to their icon. Microphone for mac computer. That bar matches the color of the cursor you'll see as they move around in the document.

A nice touch is that the person with whom you're sharing a document doesn't have to have Office 2016. They can collaborate with you using the free Web-based version of Office, available at.