Microsoft Office 16.93 (macOS)

Microsoft Office is the suite that lands on every staff MacBook at the start of term — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and OneDrive in one installer. The current build, version 16.93, runs on macOS 13 or later and is 64‑bit only.

One task: cleaning up a SIMS assessment export

A teacher sends over a raw CSV from the school MIS. Columns are in the wrong order, half the names are UPNs, and the grade column is text rather than numbers. I open it in Excel, freeze the top row, then use a quick XLOOKUP to pull pupil names from a separate sheet onto the UPNs. The Ideas pane spots that three students are two grades below the cohort median — useful for a quick intervention list, no chart-building needed. Ten minutes and the file is in shape for the head of department.

What stays on the Mac after the task

Word handles the bulk of staff document work, from lesson plans to governor reports. PowerPoint gets used for assemblies — the animation and 3D model support helps when a science teacher wants a rotating heart on screen. Outlook ties into the school’s Exchange server for mail and shared calendars. OneDrive sits in the background, syncing files so the same assessment sheet can be opened by the SENCO without emailing versions back and forth. OneNote rarely gets a look-in, but a few TAs keep behaviour logs in it.

Who leans on the suite the hardest

Three groups in a school get more out of Office than the rest. The first is anyone who inherits a shared mailbox — Outlook’s calendar and delegate features mean the head’s PA can triage meeting requests without touching the head’s laptop. The second is the data manager. Excel’s Power Query is the tool they live in, pulling GCSE results from AQA and Edexcel spreadsheets into one clean workbook before the governors’ meeting. The third group is less obvious: cover supervisors. They grab a quick PowerPoint from a shared OneDrive folder, run it on a classroom machine with no local profile, and hand the room back without leaving a trace.

Casual users — the colleague who opens Word twice a term to write a reference — barely scratch the surface. They need a typewriter with bold and italic. What they get is a full document engine they never explore. For them, the suite is oversized. For the three groups above, the size is the point.

Free Apple apps stumble on tracked changes in .docx

Apple’s own Pages, Numbers and Keynote come free with every Mac. They are lighter, launch faster, and handle basic documents without fuss. The moment someone sends in a .docx with tracked changes from a local authority, Pages trips up. Comments shift, formatting drifts, and the file goes back looking slightly wrong. That alone keeps Office on the staff image.

LibreOffice is the other comparison that comes up in technician forums. It reads and writes .docx, .xlsx and .pptx without a licence key to worry about. The trade‑off is the interface — it looks like Office circa 2010 and feels it. Font rendering on a Retina display is not quite right, and Excel macros written in VBA often fail silently. For a quick CSV edit on a bench machine it works. For a full day of lesson planning it wears the user down.

Google Workspace is the real daily rival. Sheets loads assessment data in a browser without touching the local drive, and a dozen staff can mark the same document at once. Office fights back with OneDrive co‑authoring, but the Mac version still prefers the desktop app as the editor. Where Google wins is speed to first edit — no launch time, no activation. Where Office wins is depth: Excel’s data model, PowerPoint’s slide master controls, Word’s mail merge. A school runs both, not one or the other. Office handles the heavy documents; Google handles the quick shared lists.

Mistakes that trip up new users

The most common mistake is installing the suite without the LTSC Serializer and then wondering why Outlook demands a sign‑in that never completes. The apps themselves sit in the Applications folder looking ready, but without the volume licence package they stay in reduced‑functionality mode. The fix is a full removal and a clean install with the activation step done in the right order — a half‑hour job that is entirely avoidable.

Another early slip: ignoring Microsoft AutoUpdate. Users set Office up, uncheck the “automatically keep Microsoft apps up to date” box because they dislike background processes, then complain six months later when Excel crashes opening a file made in a newer build. The monthly update cadence is real; skipping four or five builds in a row breaks compatibility in subtle ways.

The third mistake is treating OneDrive like a local drive. A teacher drags a 2 GB video into the OneDrive folder for a lesson, sees the sync icon spin, and shuts the MacBook lid. The file never finishes uploading. Next morning, the video is not on the classroom machine. The rule is simple: wait for the solid green tick before closing the lid, or keep large media on a USB stick and link to it from the PowerPoint.

Beginners also ignore the Excel formula bar’s behaviour on a Mac. On Windows, F2 enters cell edit mode. On a Mac, Control+U does the same job, but most users never find it. They double‑click the cell, select the wrong part of a formula, and overwrite it by accident. Muscle memory from Windows costs them data.

• Build 16.93 released for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.

• macOS 13 or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac
• 64‑bit only