Published 11:02 AM EDT Oct 8, 2015 A recent review of Office 2016 by Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal suggested that Microsoft should reboot its productivity suite. Many of the new features in Office 2016 focus on collaboration. Microsoft is playing catch-up with respect to supporting online collaboration capabilities when compared to other offerings, such as the free Google Docs.

I last wrote about Word over four years ago, when I lamented the poor quality of the program: it kept crashing all the time. Fowler’s article describes how the new version of Word crashed every time he tried to save a document to a collaborator’s OneDrive account in the cloud.

It seems some things never change. I have not upgraded to Office 2016 for the Mac, and I’m not sure if I will. I dislike the expensive subscription model that Microsoft is pushing on its users. If you purchase Office as a one-time download for $150, you don’t get all the programs (e.g., no Access or Publisher). It doesn’t support tablets or smartphones.

You don’t get online support. Furthermore, I don’t really want or need online collaboration for most of the Word documents or PowerPoint presentations I create. If needed, I share files using DropBox or simple email. I may be old school, but I don’t see the advantage of having four hands typing away in a single document at the same time. Monitors for new mac pro.

24: Microsoft releases Office 2019 for Windows and Mac, and indicates that it plans to release at least one more 'perpetual-license' version of Office in the future. Office 2019 is a one-time purchase that comes with classic apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for PC or Mac, and does not include any of the services that come with an Office 365 subscription. As of January 2017, the following list represents some of the products reaching end of support in the next year. Microsoft Office for Mac 2011.

The result might be comical, but not very smooth. That’s not to say I like the current method of tracking changes and edits either; there has to be a better way.

This got me thinking about the next release of Office. If we assume there’s a two-year window before Office 2018 is released, what would I like to see in it? What new features would I be willing to pay for? The first is not a feature, but an improvement in current functionality. I'd like Office programs, and Word in particular, to stop crashing so much.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Word remains the most crash-prone application I use on OS X. After literally decades of development, there’s no excuse for this poor level of software engineering. The second feature I’d welcome is more automated help with complex formulas in Excel. Leverage that artificial intelligence research. There’s a lot of latent power locked in Excel, but only a few spreadsheet wizards really know how to use it properly. The third feature I’d find useful is an easier way to include videos from the web in PowerPoint presentations. I have to go through a complicated download/convert/insert process now, and the resultant files are huge.

Scott Tilley is a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Contact him at TechnologyToday@srtilley.com.