What’s new and improved in Office 2016?
The main emphasis is on file sharing, collaboration and co-authoring – whether for Word, Excel or OneNote.

Outlook has a new “Clutter” feature: “The Clutter feature learns how you prioritize your mail and then helps you by putting low priority messages in a separate folder (while still giving you a daily summary so you don’t miss anything). When on the go, you can also take advantage of this capability by using the Focused Inbox.” (Microsoft)

Potentially useful for people who get an overwhelming amount of email and would like help tackling it.

Excel sports a new one-click forecasting feature and some new chart types to help beautify those reports.

“Tell Me” is, by far, the best new feature of all and allows you to enter words or phrases about what you want to do next and quickly get to those features or actions.

Forgot how to add a foot note? No problem! Just enter “add footnote” in the “Tell me what you want to do” box in the ribbon and it will take you right there. Gone are the days of wading through the (often not so intuitive) ribbon bar to find the right heading for the right function. Hurrah!

Other things people commented positively on is the improved access to recently opened files and the preview of appointments in calendars.

The bad, the nasty and the downright evil
The upgrade took a worryingly long time and even after the initial install, Outlook wanted to update this and Word that… However, once installed and computer restarted, performance has been good.

Outlook forgot my favourites as well as the colour coding of my categories and calendars – easily rectified but annoying all the same as it seemed so unnecessary, bad that was pretty much as bad as it got – not bad at all!

So, is the upgrade worth it?
If you are already using Office 2013 as part of an Office 365 subscription, your upgrade is free and fairly painless. Visually it has not changed too much, but there are new Office Themes to make it look the way you like it.

If you are upgrading from an older Office version like Office 2010, the change can take a bit of getting used to, so make sure you have the time to reset and retrain your mind before you decide to upgrade.

I’d say go for it – just make sure you have a proper backup first in case things go wrong…

Have PC Harmony,
so you can concentrate on the more important things in life…