Microsoft Office for Mac hasn’t had a major update since 2010. Finally, Microsoft has released one. However, it’s only for Outlook. There’s another catch–it’s currently only available to Office 365 subscribers. You cannot buy a full standalone copy at this time. Rumor has it that Microsoft will release a full Microsoft Office for Mac update later this year and will sell that as a standalone product. Microsoft is really pushing the Office 365 model and this latest offering confirms that. Thankfully, even though the new Outlook for Mac requires an Office 365 subscription, you can still point it to an on-premise Exchange installation, which is exactly what I did.
My first impression is that this version of Outlook works faster than Outlook 2011–MUCH faster. I have a semi-large mailbox – about 26,000 items in my inbox alone. One big problem that Outlook 2011 had was that it couldn’t deal with large mailboxes well. I found it would be very slow to update and would also hang up from time to time. The new Outlook for Mac (it doesn’t seem to go by a year number anymore — that’s why it’s not “Outlook 2015”) works much more smoothly. Emails arrive in my inbox just as fast as they do in Outlook for Windows. Outlook 2011 would sometimes take minutes to update, which could be very annoying when on the phone with someone waiting for an email they just sent you.
The other main thing I noticed is that the look and feel of Outlook has been updated to match that of Outlook for Windows and the Outlook Web App 2013. Even the icon has been updated to match. Everything looks fresh and updated.
In summary, the new Outlook for Mac is a vast improvement over the previous version. If you’re a current Office 365 subscriber, its a no-brainer. You should log in to your account site and download the updated version. If you purchased Office 2011 in the past and are a heavy user of Outlook, I feel the improvements are worth the cost of the Office 365 subscription. Besides, you’ll also get the updated versions of the other Office applications when those get released.