How well does the MS Office suite run on macOS?

[PeterLC]

I think this is great advice.

There are two parts to this choice for me; usability and compatibility.

I find the Windows versions of the apps far more usable. They are aesthetically more pleasing; a real pleasure to use. The Mac versions are fine, but don't wow me.

Before you commit to replacing your Windows machine with a Mac, you should open a bunch of your documents and work with them on the Mac. Only then can you be sure you will not encounter compatibility issues.

If 99% of my job was using Office applications, I would get a Windows computer.

While I agree that the Windows versions are far more usable, simply because MS strips the '~ for Mac' versions disgracefully, I feel that working with the Windows OS generally is such a frustrating mixup and so very unfriendly - probably by MS's design. I use stand-alone MS Office for Mac 2019 on an M1 MacBook Pro Max with lots of Procedures and Macros and running some of those gives very tedious performance. Almost a full second to get a screen response out of a dozen lines of code (with no for-nexts, do-whiles, arrays, etc.) using less than 15% of resources? Shameful ... but the MacOS design and handling generally overshadows all that. Running X-Plane with NO issues and fast frames is a pleasure also.

 

[phrehdd]

While I agree that the Windows versions are far more usable, simply because MS strips the '~ for Mac' versions disgracefully, I feel that working with the Windows OS generally is such a frustrating mixup and so very unfriendly - probably by MS's design. I use stand-alone MS Office for Mac 2019 on an M1 MacBook Pro Max with lots of Procedures and Macros and running some of those gives very tedious performance. Almost a full second to get a screen response out of a dozen lines of code (with no for-nexts, do-whiles, arrays, etc.) using less than 15% of resources? Shameful ... but the MacOS design and handling generally overshadows all that. Running X-Plane with NO issues and fast frames is a pleasure also.

I use Office Suite for Mac and have to agree that it is a bit stripped down compared to the Windows counterpart. However, for what I do, it works well enough. What I can say is that due to a couple of apps in the past, I ran for years VMWare Fusion and at times Parallels with Windows and those apps. I would be curious if Windows Office Suite would have any issues within a VM and if not, could be an option. I do know that Parallels has at least Windows 11 working on M1 Macs. I will say that I have used a VM (yet) on my M1 Mac so, perhaps others can give info based on their experiences.