Microsoft unveils a Universal version of Office for Apple silicon There were fresh salty tears from Microsoft fans overnight as the company posted an Arm version of its Office suite. For Mac users. A tweet from Microsoft principal software engineer Erik Schwiebert told Mac Office insiders to start their engines and, sure enough, a fresh Universal build for those picking up Apple's latest and …
As much as I disagree with you, I have to wonder how much longer the OS is going to be relevant. The browser version of the various office apps is astonishingly good. I'd move from full fat Outlook to the browser version if I could copy calendar entries (it's how I do my timesheet). The ability to search for the folder you want to file an email in is only available in the browser and is something I find really useful (YMMV).
I'm a light user of Word, so browser version sufficient.
Only other limitation is VBA in Excel, but support for that isn't universal any way.
Office Online Server is a thing: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeonlineserver/office-online-server
You just deploy the web apps inside your corporate network and people authenticate to it and access it via company infrastructure that all sites behind the firewall. Nothing gets stored outside the corporate network and it all works with Exchange Server and SharePoint.
With that said... NextCloud and Collabora allow you to do the same with LibreOffice and it has more features :-D
While I agree the browser and teams versions of 365 are tolerable as document viewers (just about); they are far from full featured. Excel is missing a lot. The dreadful performance rules them out as anything other than a doc viewer for me. That could be a symptom of corporate overhead on the network.
I'm not in the mood to buy anything Microsoft, ever, for personal use (at least nothing from this side of 1995) and especially not subscription. I don't have a benchmark to compare it to.
Perpetual O2019 will be OK a couple years yet but, like photoshop CS5, you're eventually going to begrudge not having function X in new shiny.
For corporates buying licensing on a subscription basis anyway they aren't going to notice the difference but for mere mortals and small business types, do you seriously need MS Office that badly to warrant the subscription model?
Windows on ARM gives the extended battery life and always on connectivity and is very much towards that cloud platform vision.
It is the x64 platform that is suffering in the end user platforms - expect it to only dominate as a cloud/server side architecture in time.
This could also be a statement that windows on arm emulation performs better than mac ARM Rosetta, and adequately enough on Windows ARM to get the required performance?
But I think the real reason is that if a consumer is faced with spending $1400 dollars on a portable, light, extended battery life product, they are more likely to pay for a macbook air than a windows on arm device.
Satya would be an idiot to not follow the money.
The only way Windows on arm can compete at this time, because of the hw out there, is to subsidise the HW and sell below cost. Satya would have to be an idiot like Ballmer to do that.
Ballmer was always trying to keep legacy microsoft alive and his me too apple mentality, satya has a far better working strategy as the stock and revenue growth shows.
This could also be a statement that windows on arm emulation performs better than mac ARM Rosetta, and adequately enough on Windows ARM to get the required performance?
Tests on the early Apple dev kit shows that Rosetta 2 is faster - it re-compiles the code on first run (so the first time you run an application, it is slower) and thereafter it is ARM native, whereas the Windows emulation is just that, emulation.
Those wishing to run the perpetual licensed version of Office 2019 will unfortunately have to go down the full Intel emulation route, which is currently 32-bit only (although Microsoft has said that 64-bit support would be turning up in the not too distant future.)
The Version of Office that is on my MacBook Pro is 64bit. MS took heed of the warning that Apple put out some years ago about the demise of 32bit support on MacOS with Big Sur
Excel report Version 16.41 and the System Information app reports that it is 64bit. This is the non Orifice 360 version.
Do you mean that the Intel Emulation route is 32bit only or do you mean something else?
Couldn't the Apps for MacOS (Intel) be run through the Rosetta App and then run on MacOS (Apple SI)?
Yeah, all my macOs boxes which need Office, have the latest purchased iteration available to them. The lack of Outlook on some of them is annoying, but Mail can be configured acceptably, even if the corporate server prefers the former. I won't be buying a new client, if it has to be cloud-based 365, regardless if it has nice optimizations. None of the Office apps should be stressing modern hardware enough to be substantially degraded by a Rosetta process.
To be perfectly honest, ARM is going to be where everyone else besides gamers go eventually anyway. No surprise that M$ is producing universal binaries.
Now if they'd just put out native Office for Linux...
I think it means that, on Windows, only the subscription version of Office currently provides ARM binaries.
The pay-once version is still a strictly-Intel build, and for running Intel code on ARM Microsoft supports only 32-bit binaries.
So as per the thrust of the article, Microsoft seems to be putting a lot more effort into supporting ARM processors in Macs than in PCs.
Since virtually all new Macs will be ARM based before long, it makes sense to target development at that. Windows on ARM is still low volume niche. Most Windows PCs for the next few years at least will be Intel based. I am sure that if/when Windows on ARM takes off, they will build a version of Office for it.
Put development where the demand is (or will be in the near future).
Agreed entirely; my post was because the original poster seemed to have misinterpreted the article and I also thought it could have been a bit clearer.
Historical trivia: I had a quick search, and Office was never ported to Windows NT for PowerPC at all. Or in full to Alpha or MIPS, though Excel and Word made it to Alpha. Wikipedia believes that "[Microsoft] met problems such as memory access being hampered by data structure alignment requirements" which is a credible claim even if not necessarily a credible source.
Like some other Service Vendors, there will eventually be no "buy once unless you want to upgrade" MS programs. It will all be subscription. The Windows OS though might remain free as a platform to sell the subscriptions. Pretty near impossible to buy an ordinary non-Apple laptop without Windows and there is no evidence that the big companies actually pay much for Win10. What percentage of PCs are now kitchen builds with a retail Win10?
It's amazing how quickly things can become confusing when trying to spread an OS and software across different CPU architectures.
Let's see how new Mac users get on in next few weeks and if Apple's relatively clear message of "this stuff will work, this other stuff will work very fast" holds true.
Some knock Apple for 'merely' being good at marketing, but at times like this I see their competency at communicating as a virtue.
64-bit is not better than 32-bit, it's just bigger. We're all chasing the word size believing that it's somehow better - while there are a few advantages, the fact is that the application sizes keep doubling, systems need more memory and higher cpu clock speeds each time.
Does anyone think that switching to 128-bit is going to improve things in a couple of years? Will our kids be playing games on their 512-bit cpu driven phones?
"64-bit is not better than 32-bit, it's just bigger. We're all chasing the word size believing that it's somehow better - while there are a few advantages, the fact is that the application sizes keep doubling, systems need more memory and higher cpu clock speeds each time."
That is not how that works. Applications do not double in anything, be that disk, RAM, or CPU. When an application is recompiled from 32-bit to 64-bit, the only things that need to get larger are pointers. Those do double in size. The instructions either stay the same, not changing in size, or are changed to new ones for more efficiency. Since they're not using any more data, they're still the same size. Some use of pointers means there'll be a slight increase in disk usage for the binary, but it will be small. More importantly, most storage used by a program is in the form of assets. Databases, media, documents, images, and those stay the same.
The programs that do see a difference are those that use a lot of pointers. Ones that use a lot of other types will have no change. The result is that an operating system compiled for 64-bit will have a significantly higher memory footprint because kernels have to store a lot of pointers so everyone else's virtual memory works. That point, I'll grant you. But it's not double even there.
Meanwhile, a 64-bit processor can do some types of things much better. AMD64 supports operations on 64-bit and 128-bit values that can be accomplished in one instruction whereas I386 requires several to do the same thing. What does this mean? It clearly means faster calculations, and that's true. But since you are focused on binary size, it means that each time a program does an operation like that, its disk usage is reduced by a few bytes as it chops out a few other instructions. This increase in efficiency invites programmers to use the faster processing to add features, so you will see larger programs, but you would (and did) see the same thing if they just made a faster 32-bit chip. Such programs get larger because they do more things, not because the architecture change did it to them.
"Does anyone think that switching to 128-bit is going to improve things in a couple of years?"
It won't happen, but absolutely. CPUs have come to the conclusion that 64-bit addressing will continue to work for a very long time, and it will. However, there are other kinds of chips including GPUs and ASICs that already do some parts of a 128-bit architecture or in some cases an even larger one. These are popular among people who want and are willing to pay for very good performance because they run faster for certain mathematical use cases. I fully expect that such chips will become more available in years to come and that they will be adopted by places wanting good performance. You don't need it in a consumer-level machine, but supercomputers will want it quite a lot. Eventually, gamers will get the same kind of chips so they can drive even higher-resolution screens at even faster framerates. While I rarely need either type of improvement, those things would definitely be improvements.
Apple have approx 9% of the PC & laptop market with their MacOS machines.
That 9% of the market is definitely moving to Arm (assuming that Apple's market share does not shrink).
In the Windows 10 market, I assume that Arm based machines is a tiny percentage of the market, probably < 1%.
So it makes sense for Microsoft to put more effort into Office for MacOS on Arm than into Office for Windows on Arm because there will be vastly more users of the Office for MacOS on Arm product.
Windows use is mostly inertia and Corporate compatibility, especially older Win32 x86 applications. Apple has changed CPU platform 68K, Power, x86-32, x86-64 only, ARM.
MS concept of backward compatibility on Win10 64 bit is that you image the old computer and put the file in a VM on Win10.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
The VM is "free" and included in Corporate Win10 versions.
Ironically the same file works fine in the almost same OpenBox bundled with LInux (and presumably somehow on a Mac). In addition there are legacy Windows 32 bit applications that will never be rebuilt for 64 bit and don't work on Win7 or Win 64bit (but do on 32 bit versions). In some cases the authors are dead. Many of these work on 32 bit WINE.
So I can't see Win10 ARM ever being mainstream.
>> I can't see Win10 ARM ever being mainstream
Define mainstream. If you include server, business, enterprise, perhaps.
Consumer side however - battery life benchmarks with the puported ubiquity of 5G connectivity can mean consumer compute platforms will need to be an ARM processor as people work wirelessly more and demand portability away from a charger. Intel is too focussed on suiting their architectures to cloud, making them good for x64(cloud) but bad for platform agnostic scenarios (consumer).
Now if you mean as a result windows for consumers will die because the MS offering of Windows on ARM HW is not competitive is a fair point. Just like Windows phone. Which will mean your statement becomes true, but only because the Windows market becomes business/enterprise/server markets. But if the offering gets competitive, Windows on arm can become very important.
I think this is where the Office on mac and the cloud first strategy has MS covered for whatever deficiencies the HW suppliers and PC manufacturers have in competing. If the manufactuers do compete, windows on ARM is there as a gateway to the rest of the services.
mac OS is the gateway for mac HW sales.
Windows on arm is the gateway for MS cloud services/subscription sales.
Excel and Word are two of the best Applications MS ever did. Started to go off from 2007. Someone even built a Classic Menu add-on for Word 2007.
I do have a copy of Word 2.0a and the manual. However wasn't Word and Excel first on the Mac?
The rest of Office, apart from Visio which isn't in a bundle and was bought in, is fairly pointless. Last full office I got was Office XP. I used MSSQL and later MSDE with VB6 rather Access. Eudora then Thunderbird rather than Outlook (either standalone or Office version).
Most people's needs can now be met by LO. Mac, Windows, Linux. ARM and x86. Also using Styles is important. I still get Word Documents done like a glass typewriter. Formats are important. I still get Excel documents with almost everything in General Format, rather than at the minimum setting each column to Text, Decimal, Date etc.
Disclaimer. I've used Wordstar, Wordperfect, MS Word on DOS, Supercalc, Visicalc, Lotus-123, Cracker. Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL, MSDE. CP/M, MSDOS since 2.11, OS/2, NT since 3.51, Windows since 3.0, MS Xenix, Cromix and Linux since 1998. I finally abandoned Windows in December 2016 and MS Office in 2015. I used Apple OS9 a bit (and the other OS9 on a development system).
If you go looking for Office patches or converters or utilities on MS web site you are bombarded by adverts for Office 365 and often you can only find the links on the MS sites via 3rd party Blogs or Software catalogues. So I'm not convinced MS is very committed to this build. Is it any more than PR, like Edge for Linux. I asked Linux users who moved off Windows the last few years about Edge. They are baffled. They use Chromium, Firefox or Waterfox.
The LO Styles and Document Map equivalents (Navigation with list of headings, anchors, images, links etc) is different to Word but easier to use. I have those as two floating windows with a customised Navigation floating tool bar above it.
It's a mistake to use docx as the format with Writer because that is converted on every open and save. Best to import, fix all the styles, anchors and links and headings and save in odt. Then do an EXTRA Save As in doc, or docx or what ever someone or something else needs. Also Writer only remembers your last position in the document in odt format and if you've put something in the Author / User field in Settings.
I find the LO Calc graphs easier to manage than Excel. I used to teach Excel and Word.
I suspect that the release of Apple silicon running ARM next week to the mass market will mean that the supply of Intel Macs in the supply chains will vanish fast. At the moment you can still get Mac Mini / Macbook Pro with Intel silicon to take 16G of memory. Apple have stated they'll support Intel until 2022 when the whole line will be ARM. I reckon ARM throughout all Apple devices will be there faster than all subscription O365
if you're using an Intel based Mac now - you've _barely_ got two years more in my humble estimation. If MS Office eventually works natively on ARM, you can kiss goodbye to an Intel/AMD monopoly in Windows laptops too in due course.
Wait a minute...
... Microsoft are dropping a version of Office for Mac for a 'new' CPU architecture in the SAME WEEK that Apple releases the machines with that new architecture?
I mean, OK, it's an 'Insider' only but... the SAME WEEK? Not, like, just hinting at it... or waiting six months or a year later (or longer)? That's kinda 'wow', right?
2020 just got even more 'parallel universe' than it had been already (and in a nice way!).
Microsoft own large portions of Apple and Apple own large portions of Microsoft.
It's also incredibly unlikely that the creators of the world's most popular office suite and the creators of a major operating system haven't communicated at some point about the offerings available on the new platform.
You say that, but Microsoft Office was pretty much the final thing to transition to Intel last time around; the first Intel Mac went on sale in January 2006 and the first public Intel build of Microsoft Office became available in January 2008.
That's a solid nine months after the other of the expected laggards, Adobe Creative Suite, which first reached users in April 2007.
Part of the difference is that Office is on a perpetual release cycle now whereas back then the Mac version was generally updated only every three or so years (previous versions were released in 2004, 2001 and 1998), but that didn't take much of the edge off.
"Microsoft appeared to be favouring platforms other than its own."
No apology for being a stuck record so I'll post it again :
Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows are, effectively at least, two entirely different companies.
ducks incoming downvotes.
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