The Innovative and Enriched Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016

Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 is still sitting on a lot of South African office PCs, and it still opens documents perfectly well. What has changed is the support position: Microsoft stopped issuing security updates for Office 2016 in October 2025. This is a straight look at what the suite gave you, what it costs you to keep running it, and what makes sense on a machine you rely on for work.

Quick answer: Office 2016 will keep opening your files, but it no longer receives security patches, so treat it as a stopgap rather than a plan.

What the 2016 release actually delivered

Home and Business 2016 was the version most small firms bought, because it included Outlook and it was a once-off payment rather than a monthly subscription. The headline additions at the time were practical rather than flashy.

• Outlook gained a side by side calendar and message view, and better handling of large mailboxes.
• Word added the Design tab for whole-document formatting and Smart Lookup for pulling reference material into the sidebar.
• Excel brought in new chart types, easier slicers on tables, and the Analysis ToolPak by default.
• PowerPoint added threaded comments alongside slides, which made review cycles less painful.
• OneNote was included and tied into OneDrive for notes across devices.

Ten years on, most of that is unremarkable because every version since has had it. That is the point. If your work is documents, spreadsheets and email, Office 2016 does the job.

The problem is security, not features

When Microsoft ends support for a product, the software does not stop working. What stops is the flow of patches. Office is a common way into a business network, usually through a rigged attachment, and unpatched Office is a soft target.

If the PC handles client data, banking or anything covered by POPIA, running an unsupported office suite is a risk worth taking seriously. Nothing dramatic happens on day one. The exposure just quietly grows.

Tip: if you are staying on Office 2016 for now, at minimum turn off automatic macros and treat every unexpected attachment as suspect.

What your options look like

• Microsoft 365. Monthly or annual, always current, includes cloud storage. Best for businesses that want it handled and off their minds.
• A newer perpetual Office licence. Buy once, own it, no subscription. Fewer features than 365 but the same familiar programs.
• LibreOffice. Free, open source, opens and saves Word and Excel formats. Perfectly workable for straightforward documents, occasionally fussy with complicated Excel formatting.
• Office on the web. Free with a Microsoft account and fine for light editing, though it needs a connection and is slower than the installed versions.

Whichever way you go, your existing files carry across. Office has used the same .docx and .xlsx formats since 2007. Our rundown of the software worth installing on a work machine covers the rest of a sensible setup, from antivirus to PDF tools.

The Windows question underneath it

Office 2016 and Windows 10 reached the end of the road within days of each other, and most of the machines still running the one are running the other. Sorting out Office while leaving the operating system unpatched fixes half the problem. We wrote separately about what the Windows 10 cut-off means for South African users, including how to check whether your current PC can take Windows 11.

Making the hardware keep up

Newer Office versions are not dramatically heavier than 2016, but they do assume a modern machine. Two things make the difference on an older PC:

• An SSD instead of a hard drive. Word and Excel launch in a second or two rather than fifteen.
• 8GB of RAM or more. Below that, Outlook plus a browser plus a spreadsheet starts swapping to disk. Additional memory modules are one of the cheapest upgrades available.

When a machine is too old to be worth upgrading, an ex-corporate replacement is usually cheaper than people assume. A Core i5 desktop handles Office comfortably for a full working day, and the same class of machine is available among our business laptops if the work moves around. Everything we sell arrives with genuine Windows 11 Pro, a one year warranty and nationwide delivery, so the operating system side is settled before the box arrives.

For offices replacing several machines at once, our desktop range is where most bulk orders start.

Frequently asked questions

Will my Office 2016 files still open in a newer version?

Yes. Word, Excel and PowerPoint have used the same underlying formats since 2007, so documents open without conversion.

Can I still install Office 2016 if I have the licence key?

Generally yes, if you still have the media or the download available under your Microsoft account. It will activate and run. It just will not be patched again.

Is LibreOffice good enough for a small business?

For quotes, invoices, letters and ordinary spreadsheets, comfortably. Where it struggles is heavily formatted Excel workbooks with macros, and anything you need to hand back to a client with the layout exactly intact.

Do the PCs you sell come with Office installed?

They come with genuine Windows 11 Pro. Office is licensed separately by Microsoft, so ask us and we will point you at the option that fits how you work.

Office 2016 was a good release and it served its decade well. There is no need to panic about it, but there is a good case for planning the move now rather than after something goes wrong.