You can run both perfectly well side by side and uninstalling Office 2016 will not remove Office 2011 or vice versa. Note also that installing either the preview or full purchased version of Office 2016 will not delete or copy over your current version of Office 2011 for Mac as it installs into a completely different location.

The first and most important thing to note is that Office 2016 for Mac is only available to OS X 10.1o Yosemite users – meaning OS X 10.9 Mavericks users or lower are out of luck. Note that Office 2016 for Mac is about 2.5GB but you’ll need at least 5GB of free space on your Mac to complete the installation. You used to be able to try before you buy, but the Microsoft Office For Mac 2016 Preview was withdrawn by Microsoft in October 2016. Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac was initially only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers but is now available to non-subscribers too.

Microsoft Office for Mac 2016 is the first update to Microsoft Office for Mac since 2011 so we’ve taken an in-depth look at what’s new in it.