Microsoft Office with native Apple Silicon M1 support arrives

AppleInsider

Microsoft's main app collection of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook in Microsoft 365 have all been updated to run natively on Apple Silicon M1 Macs, with more related apps coming.

Microsoft's main Office apps now run natively on Apple Silicon

Microsoft has announced that most of its Microsoft 365 apps, previously known as Office 365, have now been updated and are universal apps. Alongside support for Intel Macs, Microsoft's most popular apps will also run on the new Apple Silicon M1.

"We are excited to announce that starting today we are releasing new versions of many of our Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that run natively on Macs with M1," said Bill Doll, Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft 365, said in a blog post.

"This means that now our core flagship Office apps-- Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote-- will run faster and take full advantage of the performance improvements on new Macs, making you even more productive on the latest MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini," he continued.

"The new Office apps are Universal, so they will continue to run great on Macs with Intel processors. The apps are not only speedy, but they also look fantastic as they have been redesigned to match the new look of macOS Big Sur," Doll said.

One exception to the native M1 support is that Microsoft Teams is only available to be run in either Rosetta 2 emulation on Apple Silicon Macs, or via a browser. "We are working on universal app support for M1 Macs and will share more news as our work progresses," said Doll.

Also not available immediately, but promised for January 2021, is an updated version of what Microsoft calls Office Start. This is meant to "enable you to be more focused with immersive experiences that are easier to use right from the first screen."

"[It brings experiences] that feel both unmistakably Microsoft 365 and include elements that are native to the look of macOS so they are also unmistakably made for Mac," concluded Doll.

Microsoft 365 is available to buy now in versions ranging from home use to enterprise, all from the official site.

lordjohnwhorfin

Public service announcement: most people don’t need Office. The apps bundled with the Mac for free (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are highly capable programs that can read and write Microsoft’s file format and deliver all the features most people need.
for feature parity and higher compatibility you can get the free LibreOffice.
Now, if you have to work with complex Word layouts or Excel tables with macro programming, it’s a different story, but otherwise there is no reason to pay the Microsoft tax.

melgross

I’m impressed that they were able to redo the UI at the same time. 95% of Office type software suits users use Microsoft Office. So this is good news.

urahara

lordjohnwhorfin said:

Public service announcement: most people don’t need Office. The apps bundled with the Mac for free (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are highly capable programs that can read and write Microsoft’s file format and deliver all the features most people need.
for feature parity and higher compatibility you can get the free LibreOffice.
Now, if you have to work with complex Word layouts or Excel tables with macro programming, it’s a different story, but otherwise there is no reason to pay the Microsoft tax.

Most people do not know about existence of apple insider forum. And most people on this forum do not want to see this kind of comment (including mine ). 

cloudtalkin

lordjohnwhorfin said:

Public service announcement: most people don’t need Office. The apps bundled with the Mac for free (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are highly capable programs that can read and write Microsoft’s file format and deliver all the features most people need.
for feature parity and higher compatibility you can get the free LibreOffice.
Now, if you have to work with complex Word layouts or Excel tables with macro programming, it’s a different story, but otherwise there is no reason to pay the Microsoft tax.

By and large, no one really cares about office productivity software.  MS Office is ubiquitous.  It come bundled with a ton of computers, it works in every ecosystem (that matters), and you don't really have to think about it.  The Mac apps are okay, but again, no one really cares.  Like me, a lot of people use Office because it's low friction that works regardless of the hardware I'm using.  Family 365 subcription with all that storage just makes it a no brainer.  Not really sure what you consider an MS tax.  I guess it depends on your use case.

rwes

melgross said:

I’m impressed that they were able to redo the UI at the same time. 95% of Office type software suits users use Microsoft Office. So this is good news.

They've had the UI redesign (at least for Outlook) in the works for some time (at least 3+ months; I've been using it via a New Outlook toggle which was available in the application). Agreed though, still an impressive delivery and great news with the M1 support so quickly.

edited December 2020

mplsp

rwes said:

melgross said:

I’m impressed that they were able to redo the UI at the same time. 95% of Office type software suits users use Microsoft Office. So this is good news.

They've had the UI redesign (at least for Outlook) in the works for some time (at least 3+ months; I've been using it via a New Outlook toggle which was available in the application). Agreed though, still an impressive delivery and great news with the M1 support so quickly.

I have to use office for work but have found the new UI to lack some features (at least in outlook,) forcing me to switch back.

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

zimmermann

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

I could not agree more. Why is Apple so not competing with MS Office? It seems to me that they sort of acknowledge that MS Office is unbeatable. I hate that. 

laytech

Office 365 subscription per user at $17.50 a month (AUD) along with OneDrive is a bargain when we were just paying $17 for DropBox on its own per user. What makes Office 365 so good is the using it with OneDrive in an organisation as you can collaborate on a document without even thinking about it, just open it from OneDrive and it happens. OneDrive is our file server, it replaced hardware and it replaced DropBox and for $17 a month, its a no brainer. One of the few things of value that MS offers.

urahara

MplsP said:

rwes said:

melgross said:

I’m impressed that they were able to redo the UI at the same time. 95% of Office type software suits users use Microsoft Office. So this is good news.

They've had the UI redesign (at least for Outlook) in the works for some time (at least 3+ months; I've been using it via a New Outlook toggle which was available in the application). Agreed though, still an impressive delivery and great news with the M1 support so quickly.

I have to use office for work but have found the new UI to lack some features (at least in outlook,) forcing me to switch back.

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

Isn’t it configurable which buttons you can have? Like in the Apple Mail?

trag

zimmermann said:

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

I could not agree more. Why is Apple so not competing with MS Office? It seems to me that they sort of acknowledge that MS Office is unbeatable. I hate that. 

Ditto. At work we all use Office on the PC laptops they provide us.

On my personal Mac I would happily use Pages etc. if I could set the default save type to the office suite default file types. I have sent things to non-Mac users and forgotten to convert them causing confusion before. I use LibreOffice now as a result...

canukstorm

zimmermann said:

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

I could not agree more. Why is Apple so not competing with MS Office? It seems to me that they sort of acknowledge that MS Office is unbeatable. I hate that. 

Apple is aiming their services, for the most part, at consumers.  MS Office is so entrenched in enterprises at this point that moving away from it is more pain than it's worth, especially now that it integrates well with MS Teams.

edited December 2020

melgross

zimmermann said:

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

I could not agree more. Why is Apple so not competing with MS Office? It seems to me that they sort of acknowledge that MS Office is unbeatable. I hate that. 

Because, like it or not, Office is THE suite used professionally in government, business and academia. Apple had the chance to try to change that, but there are a number of reasons not to. The first one is that if they tried, and didn’t manage to get it right the first time, that would have been a bad thing. They would have had to go back to the old days when their old suite was ubiquitous in schools. But Apple discontinued that. It was no competitor to Office. I imagine that Apple was worried, with all of their problems, that they couldn’t get enough third party software.

A lot of developers were either abandoning Apple in the late 1990’s, or had moved development to Windows with Apple as an afterthought. That began the big push in software they began to make. So iWork was a backstop for them. When they made the deal with Microsoft, where Microsoft agreed to continue Office development for at least 5 years, they sort of moderated their plans. They’ve continued development, but at a much reduced rate. iWork specializes in the areas Office doesn’t, and is weak in the areas Office is focused on. I expect that if they did challenge Microsoft, Microsoft might decide to cut back on Apple Office development. That wouldn’t be good.

larryjw

MS Office is ubiquitous and if you can't read and write it with all the features it contains, you're not going to be productive. 

I find it overwhelming and next to unstable. The more features one adds to a product the more to debug, the more support, the more to maintain and the more possible interconnections to fail. The complexity is exponential. 

But, I do use Notes extensively on all my iPads. It's really the best thing out there for the kind of notes I write. 

What is missing from Office is MS Access. The last stable version was Access 97 however. It needs to be rewritten from the bottom up, but it's the only DB software that properly separates the backend from the frontend, makes the connection between both levels easy, and with a reasonable programming language to support it -- Visual Basic. Apple's Claris has always sucked eggs. The best backend database language is Oracle's PL/SQL, but it has no frontend capacity. 

danox

zimmermann said:

Personally, I'd be happy to use Pages for virtually everything, I just wish you could set it to save in .docx format by default. Since the rest of the world uses Word you have to convert things before forwarding or you end up with frustrated recipients. 

I could not agree more. Why is Apple so not competing with MS Office? It seems to me that they sort of acknowledge that MS Office is unbeatable. I hate that. 

Apple might be getting some sort of a kickback. The suite of Apple programs stay out of your way when using them, Pages in particular works really well with images and page layout, what you see is what you get. Microsoft is heavy into promoting Teams on all their programs and Teams gets in the way of work similar to the Autodesk version program tracking.

edited December 2020

danox

laytech said:

Office 365 subscription per user at $17.50 a month (AUD) along with OneDrive is a bargain when we were just paying $17 for DropBox on its own per user. What makes Office 365 so good is the using it with OneDrive in an organisation as you can collaborate on a document without even thinking about it, just open it from OneDrive and it happens. OneDrive is our file server, it replaced hardware and it replaced DropBox and for $17 a month, its a no brainer. One of the few things of value that MS offers.

That’s no deal for mediocracy 210 dollars a year, hope your company footing the bill.