Integration with the various components of the Office suite are tighter than everything before, and a major shift towards cloud based sharing has changed the way that professionals can use Word in some pretty major ways.

Word has always worked best as part of the largest Microsoft Office ecosystem, but Word 2016 brings this to a whole new level.

By condensing the most common tools that you're likely to use in a small but accessible menu bar, the ribbon gives more real estate to the document you're writing while allowing you to reach a variety of tools without having to dig deeply into menus.īut the big changes are reserved for collaboration. The ribbon was a controversial addition to the Office interface when it was first introduced, but it's since become a hallmark of the Word experience, and it works as well as ever. There's also improved protections built in to avoid data loss. A new search tool gives users the ability to quickly look up all the available commands. But learning how to more efficiently use the platform is easier than ever before. The menus and navigation interface are functionally the same, and you can expect to be able to find functions exactly where you remember them to be and rely on the old trusted keyboard shortcuts that have been a part of the product for years. In practical everyday terms, this is the same old Word. Fortunately, the 2016 is a return to form, bringing with it some smart updates and features that make it worth checking out by lapsed customers.īut just because Word has seen a significant update doesn't mean that veteran users will have to learn a new interface. But as free and cheap competitors came to the market, Word was starting to lag behind in terms of relevance. It's been a reliable standard on the Windows operating system for decades, and it's regarded by many as the benchmark by which all other word processing platforms are judged. For most people, Word needs no introduction. Microsoft Word 2016 is one of the most reliable, powerful, and feature rich word processors around, and while it's since been replaced by Word 2019, it still offers most of the functionality modern professionals need.

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