Microsoft Office 2016 Promises Some Big Changes

As any Microsoft Office devotee can tell you, there are some vital personal and workplace tools in the suite of products. Of course, if the price tag is any indication, Microsoft is pretty proud of its product, too. That’s why it’s strange to find so many consumers who are still running Office 2010, and it could be because the changes between 2010 and 2013 weren’t dramatic enough to justify the expense.

That may not be the case when Office 2016 rolls out in the later part of this year, expected to come close on the heels of the Windows 10 launch sometime in October. So far, the early news is that Microsoft has completely reimagined why people use these products in the first place, and that’s got to be the most exciting news of all. People are now mobile and wifi is fairly plentiful, so we can look for a lot of cross-platform integration and cloud-based access in order to take the desktop to the smartphone or tablet, and vice versa. According to some reports, this focus is so central, in fact, that Office has been completely rebuilt “from the ground up.”

While it will still be in its most user friendly state on a setup that has a keyboard and some kind of pointer device, the mobile integration is so important to the process that early price estimates are saying there is a free-but-limited option for mobile devices (much in the same way that Office 365 already operates), and then the standard prices for things like a home and student edition, a smaller scale suite of the most typical products for mid-level consumers, then the full business-oriented bells-and-whistles programs at the higher end of the price spectrum.

However the product hits the shelves, it’s certain to be worth a look, especially with its all-important cloud integration and cross-platform compatibility.