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https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/13-reasons-upgrade-microsoft-office-2016/

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https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-good-reasons-not-buy-office-2016/

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Best Microsoft Office alternative of 2025

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When you don’t want a Microsoft 365 subscription

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https://www.focus.net.nz/blog/category/general/office-365-12-reasons-why-plus-12-must-use-features

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https://www.techradar.com/news/is-there-life-after-windows-how-microsoft-needs-to-innovate-to-stay-relevant

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Now that it's been out for several month and received a number of interesting updates, the question remains: Should you buy the standalone package version of Microsoft Office 2016?

As someone who actually respects the Microsoft Office suite and what it provides, I'm going to have to say no for several reasons.

Why Microsoft Office 2016 Isn't Worth It

1. It's Expensive

Most people probably don't need Access, but Outlook is important, so you'll probably want to get the $230 package. Mac users can only get the $150 package at this time. Note that individual apps can be purchased for $110 each if you only need one specific app, and remember that OneNote 2016 is completely free.

Meanwhile, Office 365 includes all of the apps. Personal costs $7 per month (or $70 per year) to use on a single computer, while Home costs $10 per month ($100 per year) to use on up to five computers. In short, Office 2016 Professional is about equal to ~5.7 years of Office 365 Personal; or more if you purchase a monthly subscription and pause it for periods when you're not using Microsoft Office or any of the attached benefits.

2. No Free Trial

Office 2016 doesn't come with a free trial, which is strange because past versions of Office did. In fact, past versions actually came with a 60-day evaluation period, which is crucial for seeing if you actually need the new features or not.

On the other hand, you can try Office 365 Home for one month without paying a cent. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a similar free trial for these standalone packages? It doesn't make sense to me, and just seems like an unnecessary hurdle for potential customers.

3. No Cross-Platform Options

These days, it's common to sync and share work between your PC and your mobile devices, which is why Microsoft is working so hard on their mobile office apps. The truth is, they're currently beating out all of their competitors.

And while these apps are available for free, they're limited and restricted unless you have an Office 365 subscription. Why doesn't an Office 2016 purchase unlock full access to the relevant mobile apps? I don't know, but that's how it is.

4. Office 365 Has Other Goodies

When you buy Office 2016, that's all you get. Maybe that's fine in your mind - you get what you paid for, after all - but you can't ignore the fact that Office 365 comes with a few bonuses that, for some reason, aren't available to Office 2016 buyers.

Most notably, Office 365 Personal comes with 1 TB of OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype time for one user, while Office 365 Home comes with the same benefits for up to five different users.

Office 365 also comes with regular updates and free Microsoft technical support by phone or chat. When Microsoft releases a new version of Microsoft Office, anyone with an Office 365 subscription will be eligible to upgrade at no extra cost; it's part of the service.

5. What You Have Is Good Enough

Compared to previous versions, Office 2016 has a lot of smart and subtle changes that may tempt you into upgrading, but what you really need to ask yourself is whether or not you need those new features. You probably don't, and while they'd be nice to have, foregoing them could be the best thing for your wallet.

Truly, whether you have Microsoft Office 2013, Office 2010, or even Office 2007, you can still do what you need to do: create and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and more. And if that's all you need to do, why drop cash on features you'll probably never use?

Viable Alternatives to Office 2016

If you need a software suite that includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation apps, then there are a few alternatives you can explore that will give you what you need without costing a single cent. They may not be as good as Office 2016, but you do get what you pay for.

If you don't need more than the absolute basics, then the Microsoft Office mobile apps are actually quite good.

We mentioned them above, but even if you don't have an Office 365 subscription that lets you take full advantage of all features, they're still useful and productive.

For a desktop alternative to Microsoft Office, you first consideration should be LibreOffice. Not long ago, it was on the up-and-up but exactly great, but with its most recent update, LibreOffice is finally proving itself to be on par with the current king atop the throne.

This open source suite comes with tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, diagramming, flowcharting, databases, advanced math equation editor, and professional quality charts. Very much worth a look if you don't want to pay anything.

Office 2016: Not Entirely Worth It

To recap, if all you need are basic office functions, then you'll do fine with one of the free alternatives listed above. If you want the full suite, but want to get the most bang for your buck, Office 365 wins hands-down. As of now, Microsoft Office 2016 only makes sense for businesses.

If you do get Office 2016, check out these excellent tips for learning the ropes. There are a lot of new features to explore! And if you decide that Office 2016 isn't right for you, here's how to downgrade back to Office 2013.
What do you think of Office 2016? Would you rather spring for Office 365 instead? Or does it make more sense to go with something like Office 365? Tell us in the comments! Image Credits:hand refusing by Fleckstone via Shutterstock Explore more about: LibreOffice, Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Office Online, Microsoft Office Tips.

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Don't Buy Office 2016! Here's Why You Don't Need It

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Now that it's been out for several month and received a number of interesting updates, the question remains: Should you buy the standalone package version of Microsoft Office 2016? As someone who actually respects the Microsoft Office suite and what it provides, I'm going to have to say no for several reasons.

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https://www.pcworld.com/article/2027057/four-reasons-you-dont-need-the-new-microsoft-office.html

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Now that it's been out for several month and received a number of interesting updates, the question remains: Should you buy the standalone package version of Microsoft Office 2016?

As someone who actually respects the Microsoft Office suite and what it provides, I'm going to have to say no for several reasons.

Why Microsoft Office 2016 Isn't Worth It

1. It's Expensive

Most people probably don't need Access, but Outlook is important, so you'll probably want to get the $230 package. Mac users can only get the $150 package at this time. Note that individual apps can be purchased for $110 each if you only need one specific app, and remember that OneNote 2016 is completely free.

Meanwhile, Office 365 includes all of the apps. Personal costs $7 per month (or $70 per year) to use on a single computer, while Home costs $10 per month ($100 per year) to use on up to five computers. In short, Office 2016 Professional is about equal to ~5.7 years of Office 365 Personal; or more if you purchase a monthly subscription and pause it for periods when you're not using Microsoft Office or any of the attached benefits.

2. No Free Trial

Office 2016 doesn't come with a free trial, which is strange because past versions of Office did. In fact, past versions actually came with a 60-day evaluation period, which is crucial for seeing if you actually need the new features or not.

On the other hand, you can try Office 365 Home for one month without paying a cent. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a similar free trial for these standalone packages? It doesn't make sense to me, and just seems like an unnecessary hurdle for potential customers.

3. No Cross-Platform Options

These days, it's common to sync and share work between your PC and your mobile devices, which is why Microsoft is working so hard on their mobile office apps. The truth is, they're currently beating out all of their competitors.

And while these apps are available for free, they're limited and restricted unless you have an Office 365 subscription. Why doesn't an Office 2016 purchase unlock full access to the relevant mobile apps? I don't know, but that's how it is.

4. Office 365 Has Other Goodies

When you buy Office 2016, that's all you get. Maybe that's fine in your mind - you get what you paid for, after all - but you can't ignore the fact that Office 365 comes with a few bonuses that, for some reason, aren't available to Office 2016 buyers.

Most notably, Office 365 Personal comes with 1 TB of OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype time for one user, while Office 365 Home comes with the same benefits for up to five different users.

Office 365 also comes with regular updates and free Microsoft technical support by phone or chat. When Microsoft releases a new version of Microsoft Office, anyone with an Office 365 subscription will be eligible to upgrade at no extra cost; it's part of the service.

5. What You Have Is Good Enough

Compared to previous versions, Office 2016 has a lot of smart and subtle changes that may tempt you into upgrading, but what you really need to ask yourself is whether or not you need those new features. You probably don't, and while they'd be nice to have, foregoing them could be the best thing for your wallet.

Truly, whether you have Microsoft Office 2013, Office 2010, or even Office 2007, you can still do what you need to do: create and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and more. And if that's all you need to do, why drop cash on features you'll probably never use?

Viable Alternatives to Office 2016

If you need a software suite that includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation apps, then there are a few alternatives you can explore that will give you what you need without costing a single cent. They may not be as good as Office 2016, but you do get what you pay for.

If you don't need more than the absolute basics, then the Microsoft Office mobile apps are actually quite good.

We mentioned them above, but even if you don't have an Office 365 subscription that lets you take full advantage of all features, they're still useful and productive.

For a desktop alternative to Microsoft Office, you first consideration should be LibreOffice. Not long ago, it was on the up-and-up but exactly great, but with its most recent update, LibreOffice is finally proving itself to be on par with the current king atop the throne.

This open source suite comes with tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, diagramming, flowcharting, databases, advanced math equation editor, and professional quality charts. Very much worth a look if you don't want to pay anything.

Office 2016: Not Entirely Worth It

To recap, if all you need are basic office functions, then you'll do fine with one of the free alternatives listed above. If you want the full suite, but want to get the most bang for your buck, Office 365 wins hands-down. As of now, Microsoft Office 2016 only makes sense for businesses.

If you do get Office 2016, check out these excellent tips for learning the ropes. There are a lot of new features to explore! And if you decide that Office 2016 isn't right for you, here's how to downgrade back to Office 2013.
What do you think of Office 2016? Would you rather spring for Office 365 instead? Or does it make more sense to go with something like Office 365? Tell us in the comments! Image Credits:hand refusing by Fleckstone via Shutterstock Explore more about: LibreOffice, Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Office Online, Microsoft Office Tips.

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Don't Buy Office 2016! Here's Why You Don't Need It

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Now that it's been out for several month and received a number of interesting updates, the question remains: Should you buy the standalone package version of Microsoft Office 2016? As someone who actually respects the Microsoft Office suite and what it provides, I'm going to have to say no for several reasons.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-you-really-need-microsoft-office-anymore-1407873198

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As you've no doubt heard by now, Microsoft Office 2013 has arrived. So has Microsoft Office 365. Some would argue that the latter is the better deal, but I'm here to tell you don't need either one.

Office, of course, is the software suite that drives the business world. Most small shops rely on it for its core-three apps: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. With that in mind, here are four reasons you don't need the new Office:

1. A new interface means new learning

Once again, Microsoft has made fairly significant changes to Office's interface. Many of them are cosmetic (the Ribbon, for example, has been robbed of most of its color and all its depth), but there are also some changes to the way the suite operates.

That's not necessarily a bad thing (there's less clutter), but it does present a learning curve-and the last thing you need is to spend time and money retraining yourself and/or your employees to use a new Office.

2. Upgrades can be a hassle

As PC World's Yardena Arar noted in her hands-on impressions of Office 2013, you can run into trouble when dealing with the 32- and 64-bit versions of the suite: "Microsoft says an Office 365 license can cover a mix of 32- and 64-bit installations, but if you're upgrading from Office 2010, you cannot switch from the version of that installation. In other words, you can't upgrade the 32-bit version of Office 2010 to the 64-bit version of Office 365 and vice versa."

Why? It seems fairly ridiculous Microsoft can't accommodate customers who are currently running 32-bit Office and want the 64-bit version. But there you go.

3. Still no Android or iOS versions

Although Office 365 supports mobile devices, it supports only Windows-powered mobile devices. That means you can't get native Word, Excel, and the like on, say, your Android tablet or iPad. That option might provide mobile workers with considerable incentive to upgrade, but until Microsoft sees fit to offer it (and that's still an "if" at this point), there's no mobile advantage in Office 2013.

4. There are cheap and free alternatives

Perhaps the biggest reason of all to steer clear of Office 2013? Price. Although Microsoft now offers a compelling subscription model, the fact is you can get a capable office suite for a lot less-or even for nothing.

Indeed, as PC World's Katherine Noyes recently reported, there are no fewer than five viable open-source Office 2013 alternatives that cost zero dollars. Will they give you all the features of Office 2013? Nope. Will they provide perhaps 90-100 percent of what most businesses need? Yep. And, heck, if you're into the whole cloud-sync thing, don't overlook options like Google Docs and Zoho Docs. (They're free as well.)

What are your thoughts on Office 2013? Can your business live without it? Or do you think Microsoft has crafted its most compelling office suite yet, and hang the hassles?

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Four reasons you don't need the new Microsoft Office

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As you've no doubt heard by now, Microsoft Office 2013 has arrived. So has Microsoft Office 365. Some would argue that the latter is the better deal, but I'm here to tell you don't need either one. Office, of course, is the software suite that drives the business world.

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I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...

Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?

I've been using word processors and text editors for nearly 30 years. There was an era before Microsoft Word's dominance when a variety of radically different paradigms for text preparation and formatting competed in an open marketplace of ideas. One early and particularly effective combination was the idea of a text file, containing embedded commands or macros, that could be edited with a programmer's text editor (such as ed or teco or, later, vi or emacs) and subsequently fed to a variety of tools: offline spelling checkers, grammar checkers, and formatters like scribe, troff, and latex that produced a binary page image that could be downloaded to a printer.

These tools were fast, powerful, elegant, and extremely demanding of the user. As the first 8-bit personal computers appeared (largely consisting of the Apple II and the rival CP/M ecosystem), programmers tried to develop a hybrid tool called a word processor: a screen-oriented editor that hid the complex and hostile printer control commands from the author, replacing them with visible highlight characters on screen and revealing them only when the user told the program to "reveal codes". Programs like WordStar led the way, until WordPerfect took the market in the early 1980s by adding the ability to edit two or more files at the same time in a split screen view.

Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, research groups at MIT and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center began to develop the tools that fleshed out the graphical user interface of workstations like the Xerox Star and, later, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh (and finally the Johnny-come-lately imitator, Microsoft Windows). An ongoing war broke out between two factions. One faction wanted to take the classic embedded-codes model, and update it to a graphical bitmapped display: you would select a section of text and mark it as "italic" or "bold" and the word processor would embed the control codes in the file and, when the time came to print the file, it would change the font glyphs being sent to the printer at that point in the sequence. But another group wanted to use a far more powerful model: hierarchical style sheets. In a style sheet system, units of text -- words, or paragraphs -- are tagged with a style name, which possesses a set of attributes which are applied to the text chunk when it's printed.

Microsoft was a personal computer software company in the early 1980s, mostly notable for their BASIC interpreter and MS-DOS operating system. Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates to write applications for the new Macintosh system in 1984, and Bill agreed. One of his first jobs was to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- Microsoft Word for Macintosh. Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.

Over the late 1980s and early 1990s Microsoft grew into a behemoth with a near-monopoly position in the world of software. One of its tactics became known (and feared) throughout the industry: embrace and extend. If confronted with a successful new type of software, Microsoft would purchase one of the leading companies in the sector and then throw resources at integrating their product into Microsoft's own ecosystem, if necessary dumping it at below cost in order to drive rivals out of business. Microsoft Word grew by acquiring new subsystems: mail merge, spelling checkers, grammar checkers, outline processing. All of these were once successful cottage industries with a thriving community of rival product vendors striving to produce better products that would capture each others' market share. But one by one, Microsoft moved into each sector and built one of the competitors into Word, thereby killing the competition and stifling innovation. Microsoft killed the outline processor on Windows; stalled development of the grammar checking tool, stifled spelling checkers. There is an entire graveyard of once-hopeful new software ecosystems, and its name is Microsoft Word.

As the product grew, Microsoft deployed their embrace-and-extend tactic to force users to upgrade, locking them into Word, by changing the file format the program used on a regular basis. Early versions of Word interoperated well with rivals such as Word Perfect, importing and exporting other programs' file formats. But as Word's domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly -- with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF - but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the "Save As ..." dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you. The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. And "fast save" made the picture worse, by appending a journal of changes to the application's in-memory state. To parse a .doc file you virtually have to write a mini-implementation of Microsoft Word. This isn't a data file format: it's a nightmare! In the 21st century they tried to improve the picture by replacing it with an XML schema ... but somehow managed to make things worse, by using XML tags that referred to callbacks in the Word codebase, rather than representing actual document semantics. It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident ...

This planned obsolescence is of no significance to most businesses, for the average life of a business document is less than 6 months. But some fields demand document retention. Law, medicine, and literature are all areas where the life expectancy of a file may be measured in decades, if not centuries. Microsoft's business practices are inimical to the interests of these users.

Nor is Microsoft Word easy to use. Its interface is convoluted, baroque, making the easy difficult and the difficult nearly impossible to achieve. It guarantees job security for the guru, not transparency for the zen adept who wishes to focus on the task in hand, not the tool with which the task is to be accomplished. It imposes its own concept of how a document should be structured upon the writer, a structure best suited to business letters and reports (the tasks for which it is used by the majority of its users). Its proofing tools and change tracking mechanisms are baroque, buggy, and inadequate for true collaborative document preparation; its outlining and tagging facilities are piteously primitive compared to those required by a novelist or thesis author: and the procrustean dictates of its grammar checker would merely be funny if the ploddingly sophomoric business writing style it mandates were not so widespread.

But this isn't why I want Microsoft Office to die.

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer's integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon.

PS: I write for a living. And if you're interested in seeing what I write, my latest novella, "Equoid", goes on sale tomorrow (October 16th). At no point was Microsoft Word involved in its creation; and you can buy it as an ebook from all the usual stores, via the menu here.

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Why Microsoft Word must Die - Charlie's Diary

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I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ... Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use.

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Jessica Wanecski

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alex
dubay