Microsoft Previews Build of Office 2016 Mac Productivity Suite

Microsoft (MSFT) has rolled out a free preview version of Office 2016 for Apple’s (AAPL) Mac, downloadable from the vendor’s Office for Mac Preview web page.

The cloud-based Mac productivity suite, which integrates with Office 365, OneDrive and SharePoint, enables users to access documents both from personal and business accounts from a variety of devices requiring only an Office sign on.

The package includes updated Mac versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, featuring a modernized user experience, redesigned ribbon to organize features, a refreshed task pane interface and new themes and styles, said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office 365 Client Apps and Services team, in a blog post.

“Similar to our recent announcements of universal Office apps for Windows 10 and Office for Android tablet, Office 2016 for Mac shares an unmistakably Office experience–but it is also thoughtfully designed to take advantage of the unique features of the Mac,” Koenigsbauer said.

The new apps also “offer full retina display support with thousands of retina-optimized graphics, full screen view for native immersive experiences, and even little Mac affordances like scroll bounce,” he said.

Office 2016 for Mac requires OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Technically, only Word, Excel and PowerPoint are new–the latest version of OneNote was released on February 19 and Outlook is the same app that Office 365 users already use on their Macs.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the new features of the three updated productivity apps:

Word: The design tab manages layout, colors and fonts across a document, and the navigation pane refines the document structure and navigates to points of interest.

Excel: A new Analysis ToolPak offers statistical functions such as moving averages and exponential smoothing. PivotTable Slicers help to cut through large volumes of data to find patterns that answer questions.

PowerPoint: New Presenter View displays the current slide, the next slide, notes and a timer on the user’s Mac while projecting only the presentation to the audience on a big screen.

Microsoft has said it will update the Office 2016 preview for the Mac on a regular basis with every build expiring some 60 days after release. The official launch is slated for sometime this summer but there’s no word on pricing so far.

“We’re looking forward to hearing from the Mac community and will use the feedback to finalize the product for release later this summer,” Koenigsbauer wrote.