Microsoft made massive changes in Office 2016 for Windows but has hidden most of the changes beneath a reassuringly familiar-looking surface. With the new version, the world's most-powerful and widely used office application suite leaves its online and desktop-based competition even further in the dust, especially in its convenient and deeply integrated collaboration features.

As always with Microsoft Office, it's vastly better than anything else out there, and only a few advanced users will find odd corners of inconvenience that Microsoft hasn't bothered to fix. So far only available to Microsoft Office 365 subscribers, traditional buyers of standalone perpetual license versions of Office will have to wait until an unspecified date to buy Office 2016, but Office 365 subscribers will be offered the option to upgrade immediately. There are a wide variety of Office 365 pricing schemes, but the personal edition of Office 365 starts at $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year for use on one PC, one tablet, and one phone.

The final release of Office 2016SEE IT offers no big surprises for adventurous users who've been working with the preview version that Microsoft released back in May, and offers an almost flat learning curve for longtime users who feel at home editing documents in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and taking notes in OneNote. The big changes appear when you start editing collaboratively in Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, with two or more users editing the same document simultaneously and optionally exchanging text, voice, or video chat via Skype, with the Skype functions accessible directly from the document.

The new features get even more elaborate when you start working with other team members using timesaving Group functions built into Outlook. In all these changes, Microsoft isn't merely playing catch-up with collaborative services like Google Apps or Zoho Office. Some of Office's collaboration features are so effective and intuitive that you may wonder why no one thought of them before.

Other changes that Desktop users won't notice include handwriting support for equations, so tablet users can draw an equation on a touch screen and see Office transform it into typeset form—impressively but not always perfectly accurately in my ham-fisted testing. Another change brings the traditional Office apps closely in line with new mobile versions for iOS and Android. Office 2016 is now the first more-or-less universal office application suite, with consistent versions available via any modern Web browser and every standard desktop and mobile platform except Linux.

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I'll get back to Outlook's Group features after surveying what's new in Office's traditional big three apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. A major new convenience is a "Tell me what you want to do" box in the top-line menu that lets you find a feature without opening various tabs until you find it. You either click in the Tell Me box or type Alt-Q to start typing in the box, and a drop-down menu lists likely matches for the words you type.

So if you can't remember that you record a macro from the View menu (Microsoft's totally irrational location for the macro feature), just type "Record macro" in the Tell Me box, and let Word open the macro-recording dialog for you. Unfortunately, the Tell Me feature won't find what you're looking for in the Options menu, which is just as cluttered and confusing as it was in older versions.