Can you please clarify what aspects of performance are "substantially better" and, hence, why I would want to "upgrade"? Office 2011 works perfectly fine for me on my 2013 MBA so I am wondering what is better, particularly in view of the comments from Preclaro_tipo. Thanks.
On my MacBook Air Office 2011 developed several problems:
1. The start-up time and the shut-down times of the programs continued to become longer. While the performance was OK in the beginning, over time (and several system updates from Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks to Yosemite) the time it took to load the programs deteriorated. In the end it sometimes took 10-15 seconds until the programs were loaded. When I right-clicked on the symbols it took several seconds to show the menus. And when I shut the programs down, it would again take a long time, until the programs disappeared. Load and shut down times are not completely immediate on the MacBook Air with Office 2016, but a lot faster than with 2011. Also the right click menu appears instantaneously.
2. Loading a Word document (150 pages, a few images, some literature references) was really "glitchy". It took a long time for all pages to be loaded and to appear, while scrolling down, I was regularly reset to the top of the document, while more pages were loading. Images started to disappear and re-appear, when you scrolled over them. Saving the document would result in a "save bar" that you could watch loading, while the document was saving. All in all I would not consider this a heavy document and I would expect an application like Word to handle it more gracefully. With the 2016 version of Word, the same document almost loads instantaneously, you can scroll down, even when pages are still loading, images won't disappear and re-appear and saving is also almost instantaneous.
3. Working within a document (be it Word, Excel or PowerPoint) became increasingly frustrating, since even simple things like copying or cutting a sentence or a PowerPoint slide resulted in long loading times that regularly showed the spinning beachball. Inserting new slides into PowerPoint also resulted in long loading times and the beachball. Not the mention working with images, even small ones. This has all been remedied in the new version of Office.
4. I am using Papers 3 and Magic Citations a lot to quote literature references. Using this function in Word had also become increasingly slow up to the point, where it was almost unusable, when you had more then 60 or 70 references. No problems in the new Office so far.
So for me, the overall experience as well as start-up speed, shut-down speed, the access to menus as well as the workflow within the apps has greatly improved.
If you do not have these problems with Office 2011, an upgrade is maybe not worth it.
