Monday, February 8, 2016

If you haven’t downloaded the latest version of Office yet, you may soon get a notice reminding you to do so beginning as soon as Tuesday, February 9, 2016.

University students, faculty and staff can upgrade their personal Mac and Windows computers to the Office 2016 for free through their UGAMail account.

Office 2016 includes all of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite – such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and OneNote – but with improved functionality for formatting documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

University students and employees who have not upgraded to Office 2016 on their personal computers will see a notice prompting them to install Office 2016 at the top of the screen each time they open an Office application. Users using Office applications on a University-owned computer will not see this notice.

Users are not required to upgrade to Office 2016; however, Microsoft will stop offering security updates for older versions of Office at the end of the year.

If you wish to upgrade, click the “Update Office” button on the notice and a browser window will open, directing you to log-in to your Office 365 account.

University students, faculty and staff can also update to Office 2016 on their personal computers by logging into their web-based UGAMail account.

Once logged in, click on the gear icon in the top right hand corner to access Office 365 settings. Click on the Software tab and you will see an option to download and install Office 2016.

The upgrade downloads in the background. When the download is complete, you will receive a notice that the upgrade is ready to install.

Before installing, you must close all Office applications. Installation takes about 10-15 minutes.

You do not have to uninstall any previous versions of Office before installing the latest version. Full instructions on how to download and install the latest version of Office are available on the Microsoft Office ProPlus section of the EITS Help Desk website, eitshelpdesk.uga.edu.

Faculty and staff wishing to update Office applications on their University-owned devices should contact their departmental IT staff.