A quick review of Office 2016 for Mac & OneDrive for Business Mac Edition

I am becoming increasingly impressed by the betas Microsoft releases. Office 2016 for Mac is absolutely ready for prime time and is a big upgrade over Office 2011! First of all, the Office apps seamlessly integrate with Office365 (NB. you must have Office365 Small Business Premium in order to connect to your SharePoint drive), the look and feel is dramatically better, mirroring the 2013 version of the apps on the PC, or the iOS apps. While accessing existing files is excellent, there still is no way to create new folders or delete folders within SharePoint on the Mac. This is still a quantum leap forward from Office 2011.

OneDrive for Business is nearly perfect; it syncs anything you put in quickly and the program runs in the tray near the wireless icon, letting you know exactly where OneDrive is in the sync process. I did notice syncing is not asynchronous; it seems download supercedes upload in the sync process. Again a quantum leap forward for Mac users.

These two releases make Office365 on the Mac a compelling offering, making the solution completely viable for Mac users. Congrats Microsoft!