Hm. That's thought-provoking. Irritated by the instability of Microsoft's Office 2016 on the latest version of MacOS, El Capitan, I've just nuked the whole installation with the intention of reinstalling it from scratch.

Imagine my astonishment when I found that nuking Office liberated no less than 16 GB (closer to 17 GB, in fact) of disk space. Wow!

Hmm, possibly Office follows the equivalent of Moore's law, i.e. every new version requires double the processing power, disk space and memory as the previous one...

As bad as it is on PC's, it think that it is has gotten equally as bad on tablets and phones. Apps that used to be 3-5MB are now upwards of as much as 80-90MB. Tablets and smartphones are really just pocket computers running on slightly scaled down operating systems, and are certainly subject to Moore's Law.

--Ken

Without wishing to speak too soon, if anybody else has been having stability issues with Office 2016, I can recommend a full uninstall/reinstall. Apart from saving around 10 GB of hard-drive space, it does appear to solve the various problems (Word/Excel crashing, files being spontaneously nuked to zero bytes, etc.)

There's a sensible article on uninstalling Office 2016 here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Uninstall-Office-2016-for-Mac-eefa1199-5b58-43af-8a3d-b73dc1a8cae3?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1

They also appear to have streamlined installation for users of Office 365 (like moi); much more straightforward.

Cheers,
Bill

Thanks Bill.

I'm hoping this will fix the problem I've encounted in Office 2016 -- especially Word and Excel -- of the response to keyboard input becoming excruciatingly slow.

Still using Office 2010 over here. I didn't like the aesthetics of 2013 (besides the blurry font problem), and I literally don't know what I'm missing with 2013 or 2016, as I'm not missing anything (i.e. I'm pretty happy with 2010).

Any killer features in 2016 that would make it worthwhile to consider?

To be honest, I'm not the one to talk to about killer features, because I only used Office 2013 for a short while before embarking on the beta of Office 2016. (In fact, that might explain why I had problems with El Capitan; because of all the deadwood built up over the beta period; hadn't thought of that. Maybe that applies to you too, Paul?)

The only things I'd say are: Office 2016 looks much nicer, and is generally faster and smoother in operation - until you start saving files, when it does, for some reason, slow down a bit. But not a lot. But I only really use Word, OneNote and occasionally PowerPoint (I hate and loathe Excel, and tend to use Numbers instead, or even Soulver). OneNote is definitely nicer in its 2016 incarnation, although it still doesn't have folding (unlike OneNote for Windows).

On the downside, despite Microsoft's hard work on the whole collaboration/interaction thing, I think their commenting system is actually worse in 2016 than it was in 2013. Although comments and changes appear in a very elegant list down the right-hand side, it's often quite difficult to tell which bit of the list relates to which bit of the actual text - a rather ridiculous shortcoming. IMHO, the newly updated version of Pages actually has a vastly superior commenting/change-tracking function. As does Quip, actually.

But them's just my thoughts - I don't pay much attention to features between one version of Office and the next, just to the "feel". And overall, I do feel that working in Word 2016 is pleasanter than it was in Office 2013.

@Bill -- your advice about ripping out Office and starting over seems to have worked. The slow responsiveness of Office 2016 on OS X is not happening. (Yet. There's always a "yet" with Microsoft.)

Killer features? Not in Office. Ever? I prefer Word and Excel to the new editions of Pages and Numbers, though, because I dislike the dumbing down of the hack job Apple did on those apps a couple years ago.

Paul: yes, I agree that Apple did do damage to Pages and Numbers, but they have made it (gradually) back up over the past couple of years. Numbers continues to be one of my favourite apps.

BUT... both apps produce the most enormous files! I've no idea why. Compare Word's remarkably svelte little files with those produced by Pages - there's really no comparison. A file that in Word weighs in at a mere 16 KB may be as much as 350 KB in Pages. Now I know Word uses compression techniques, and is basically a collection of subfiles grouped around an XML core, but why on earth can't Apple do that?

This is particularly annoying when you're using Apple's apps on mobile devices.

Having said which, my daughter has been a Mac user from her earliest infancy, and doesn't appear to give a monkey's about file sizes. But that's youth, eh? Spoiled by excessive amounts of storage... back in the day (mutter mutter mutter DOS mutter).

And I've gone back off Apple Mail again (at least on OS/X), because it keeps losing all my SMTP server settings. Very very irritating! So it's back to Airmail for me (the latest version, only released a couple of days ago, is much better than before and has also introduced "slide to delete").

Apple definitely have work to do on the software front.