If you have an Office 365 ProPlus, Business Premium or Enterprise E3 licence (that means business users) you can now try out an early version of Office 2016 for Windows.
It’s officially called the “Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview”.
You can go to Microsoft Connect for details and apply for access to the preview software.
The usual warnings apply. Don’t use preview software on any important or production machine. There’s likely to be software crashes, possible data loss and generally tears before bedtime. It’s best to use a virtual machine (Hyper/V or Vmware) to keep the beta software separate.
The early word is that the March 2015 preview is quite a sick puppy. Plenty of install problems and the preview won’t co-exist with Office 2013 on the same computer (which Microsoft warns about but is still a concern). Even once you get it installed, there’s many reports of problems, in particular on previews of Windows 10. That’s not a big surprise since you’re running a beta operating system with beta software on top of that – a recipe for trouble.
If you must try this Office 2016 preview, do it on a virtual machine with Windows 8. At least then you’re only trying one beta at a time.
