Template talk:Latest stable software release/Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac

Information on Office 2016 for Mac, non-365, is harder to find (from Microsoft)

Between the prior edit (in December of 2018) and the edit I just did (in May of 2019), Microsoft made it much harder to find documentation for Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac, because they are pushing Microsoft Office 365 for Mac very hard, and they also seem to have "Microsoft Office for Mac 2019", which is indeed available as a one-time purchase, but they make it sound like it is synonymous with the Office 365 subscription-based model. Also, the major version is 16 for all three products: Office 2016 for Mac, Office 2019 for Mac, and Office 365 for Mac. And the release dates are often identical or close together. They do not have feature parity, though. The largest difference in features is if you pay for a 365 Subscription and then get all the cloud-based, internet-based features.

Microsoft now seems like a less reliable source of information about their own products than public Git repositories for software that interfaces closely with Microsoft Office for Mac. Microsoft tends to publish the Release Notes at least 24 hours after regular end users have begun installing it. The build date, official release date, and auto-generated publication date for the now-current versions are as follows: 2019-05-12, 2019-05-14, and 2019-05-15, according to Microsoft, see here:

Docs.Microsoft.com - Release Notes Office 2016 for Mac

I just realized that the Microsoft Docs are on GitHub with honest timestamps:

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/microsoft-365-docs

It's official, they are past-dating the docs. Unless the website actually changes earlier than the commits to GitHub, but I doubt it, the GitHub source code looks like it honestly is the source of the rendered webpage. Notice that you can past-date Git commits if you want by setting GIT_COMMITTER_DATE and GIT_AUTHOR_DATE manually. That would be extremely confusing. They are past-dating the prose inside the Git commits, this is obvious from the GitHub commit timestamps.

Honestly, the GitHub pages are easier for me to navigate than the rendered HTML website. So if nothing else, the GitHub link above may be helpful after Microsoft rebrands another thing. I bet "MicrosoftDocs" will still be the name of the GitHub project even if they change the name to "Microsoft Office Over 9000". Over 9000 is obviously a joke, but they rebranded the Windows products as "C2R" (click-to-run), so Microsoft definitely changes official names of things. Fluoborate (talk) 08:47, 24 May 2019 (UTC)