

I kind of dig it, but if you want to flip the appearance so things are monochrome up top and colorful down at the bottom, you can-in the General section of the Preferences window, you can switch from the "Colorful" theme to the "Classic" model and that selection will be applied to all office apps. It's bold and not quite Mac-like, but fits exactly with the look of the product on iOS. In the final version of Office 2016, the title bar is full-on green in Excel, blue in Word, and so forth. In the first beta, Excel's top bar was Yosemite-style monochrome, but there was a nod to Excel Green in the status bar at the bottom. One visual change from the initial public beta release is that Microsoft has decided the unifying color scheme of Office products should extend to the title bars at the top of windows. The toolbar at the very top of the window is now smaller and shares space, Yosemite-style, with the open/close/minimize buttons. Toolbar buttons have been freed of heavy borders and gradients. Gone is the giant stack of toolbars found in Office 2011 (yes, seriously, the last new version of Office for Mac was five years old), replaced by a unified tab/ribbon bar. I wrote about Office 2016 for Mac back in March, when the public beta arrived, and my impressions then still hold: This is an attractive release that looks better than Office for Mac has ever looked, while offering connectivity to the iOS and Windows versions of the product. It's available now for Office 365 subscribers and students, and will be available in a standalone purchase edition in September.

After four months in public beta, Office 2016 for Mac arrived in its final form Thursday, with Microsoft announcing the news on its Office for Mac blog.
