
Around since 2010, the website has largely flown under the radar, overshadowed by the desktop versions of Office. provides completely free, but slightly limited, online-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other tools.

To make the decision a bit easier, this guide will go over the three different ways to use Office and what you get with each pick. Microsoft doesn't exactly make it simple to tell the difference between your choices. Because of that, you get several different ways to buy Office 2016, and you'll be forgiven if you don't know which one to pick. Long gone are the days of grabbing a box of CDs at the store - today, subscriptions are the norm, but they're not the only way to buy. If you're eager to use the new apps, they are available now, but first, you have to figure out how you'll purchase them. Microsoft Office 2016 will display Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files made with Microsoft Office 97 to 2003 with Microsoft Office 2000 symbols in place of Microsoft Office 2016's symbols.This week, Office 2016 arrives for Windows and the software is a major upgrade to the previous versions of Microsoft's productivity suite. Microsoft offers to freely replace these older 2013 versions with an updated version. Microsoft Office 2016 cannot coexist with Microsoft Office 2013 apps, but it can coexist with earlier versions of Microsoft Office, such as 2003, 2007, and 2010. Other smaller features include Insights, a feature powered by Bing to provide contextual information from the web, a Designer sidebar in PowerPoint to optimize the layout of slides, new chart types and templates in Excel (such as treemap, sunburst chart (also known as a ring chart), waterfall chart, box plot and histogram, and financial and calendar templates), new animations in PowerPoint (such as the Morph transition), the ability to insert online video in OneNote, and a data loss prevention feature in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.


New features in the Windows release include the ability to create, open, edit, and save files in the cloud straight from the desktop, a new search tool for commands available in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook named "Tell Me", more "Send As" options in Word and PowerPoint, and co-authoring in real time with users connected to Office Online. The perpetually licensed version on macOS and Windows was released on 22 September 2015.

Mainstream support ends on 13 October 2020, and extended support ends on 14 October 2025. It was released on macOS on 9 July 2015 and on Microsoft Windows on 22 September 2015 for Office 365 subscribers. Microsoft Office 2016 (codenamed Office 16) is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite, succeeding both Office 2013 and Office for Mac 2011.
