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It's thus good to see Microsoft nearly finished with a long-awaited update that brings the OS X and Windows versions of Office closer together in style, while adding integrations with Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage. A preview version of Office for Mac 2016 was released today, and there's enough to give Mac users reason to look forward to the final bits and reminders of bugginess that can afflict Microsoft software for the Mac.

The preview for OS X Yosemite is free to download and use until its official release in the second half of 2015. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. We've already covered the Outlook and OneNote redesigns, so we'll just focus on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in this brief hands-on.

Microsoft has been doing a great job making Office cross-platform, with mobile versions for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. The ability to use Office across Windows, Mac, and mobile devices, all tied together with cloud storage, is what convinced me to recently begin making much heavier use of OneNote and Word for researching and writing articles. That usually means I make heavy use of Windows in a Parallels virtual machine so I can type in the "real" version of Office, but the Office for Mac 2016 preview gives me hope that I'll be able to reduce my use of that Windows virtual machine.

My Office needs are relatively simple—I don't do much more than type words in an occasionally coherent fashion. But Word for Mac 2011 always drove me away with the bizarre way it handles hyperlinks. When you click a link in a Word for Mac 2011 file, the software offers a message that says, "Word is preparing to load this document" and then makes you wait far too long before opening the link in your default browser. It's a hyperlink, Office, you don't have to load a document! Maybe it's a minor quibble but it's the kind of thing that made Office for Mac seem very un-modern to me. Anyway, the new Word for Mac preview fixes that problem. Now it just opens links like any normal application does.

The preview is not without bugs. I've barely started using the new Excel and already it has forced me to close the application three times because it wouldn't let me use the mouse to click on different cells. I could still navigate cells with the arrow keys, but I had to restart the software to regain mouse control. It's a good thing you can install the preview without uninstalling Office 2011; the beta and the stable version can both run on your Mac.

It's just a beta so bugs are forgivable, and there's evidence Microsoft is working hard to get this right. We had a Microsoft engineer show up in the comments section of our story earlier today to take bug reports from Ars readers; Microsoft's "Apple" team is clearly devoted to its craft. So far, I think that's paid off more on the iOS side, where Microsoft Office is among the best productivity tools available. It's time that Office for Mac becomes a full-fledged member of the Office family.