M1 Mac: how is the experience with Microsoft Office and Parallels?

[James_C]

I consider myself a power Office 365 user. I am an accountant and I have some very complex financial models in Excel. Lookups, Pivot tables galore. There are only two people in the office with a Mac. I have a 16GB M1 MBA that I bought last year that replaced a 2016 15" MBP. The M1 MBA is around twice a fast as the MBP that it replaced. It runs the financial models well, much better than my work colleagues how are running Windows and Microsoft 365 on two years old Intel PC Laptops.

My advice if you want to save money is get a M1 MBA base model and upgrade the RAM to 16GB. If you prefer working on a larger screen get an external monitor. I use a 35" widescreen LG monitor and its a great setup as the monitor has a USB C connecter that plugs into the MBA and charges it as well as drives the LG Screen. That screen was £500 in the UK. That screen may be overkill for what you need, the Base MBA with 16GB RAM is £1199 in the UK.

I am also running the Beta ARM version of Windows 11 through parallels and that runs pretty well as well. I have got Office 365 for Windows set up on Windows Arm and it runs well, although I don't really use it. The Mac version does everything I need it to. However I can remember a few years ago before Microsoft really brought the Mac version of office up to scratch it was better to run Office on a virtual PC than use the Mac Version. Thankfully I don't need to do that any more as the Mac Version of Excel is now multi threaded.

 

[ADGrant]

Honestly, I ran into such a horrible issue with Office it made my opinion of macOS worse. When I opened Outlook for the first time, the dock, menu bar and desktop icons would flash in and out like a strobe light whenever I moved my mouse. The contents of the "Sign In" or "Activate Office" dialog went blank and showed contents as a strobe light too. This happened every time I launched Outlook, so I could not activate Office or sign in to my 365 account. However, Word let me and once I was signed in I did not experience the issue.

Do you need to run Outlook on your Mac. The built in apps can connect to an Exchange account?

 

[skaertus]

Did I seriously just watch a video by some YouTuber juding Office 365 by how quickly the applications launch immediately after they have been closed?


I can't comment on how much better or worse memory management is but I can give you a quick recap of nine months of daily Office 365 use on an 8 GB M1 MacBook Air. Long story short: it works just fine. The only issue I have had for many years now is that Outlook is a memory hog and can easily use upwards of 1.5 GB of RAM if left running for several days. With that said this isn't M1-specific as it happens on my 2017 Intel iMac as well. The solution: close Outlook regularly, maybe once or twice a week. Other than that I have not yet encountered any issues with this 8 GB M1 Air, and it runs Office 365 faster than my 2017 iMac with 16 GB and is generally speaking very smooth and responsive.

Keep in mind, however, that Office 365 for Windows plays in a whole different league. In terms of raw performance and features Office for Mac is nowhere near Office for Windows, never has been and most likely never will be, even if the former were running on a brand-new top-specced M1 iMac with octa-core CPU, octa-core GPU, and 16 GB of RAM and the latter on a 10-year old junky and dying dual-core laptop with 4 GB of RAM. There's just no comparison.

This. Office for Windows performs far better, and I do not need to have a great machine to run it. I have a MacBook Pro with a 6th generation Core i7 with 16 GB RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD, and Office for Mac runs painfully. Office for Windows simply files when I run it on BootCamp on the same machine. I want to know if the M1 will change this or if I will have to change my Mac every couple of years to run Office acceptably.

 

[skaertus]

I've run Office 365 a bit on my M1 MBA, and I don't see any performance issues with it.

That said, I far prefer Libre Office to MS Office. Well, let me qualify that statement.

I've used the various different programs which now make up MS Office since before Microsoft first created the bundle, and "back in the day" I always felt they were really nice and snappy and well-built programs. Then, as Microsoft decided to bundle and later to quasi-integrate them, I still felt they were solid and great, all the way up through Office 2003.

I didn't much care for the Office 2007 redesign, but once I got used to it, it was still pretty solid and decent.

However, I've found that later iterations pretty much suck no matter which platform you're running them on. They have over-thought the user interface, trying to make things more rounded out and "smooth" but in my view it's really taken away from the overall responsiveness of each of the programs. I can't, for example, stand typing in Word 365, and I also really don't care for navigating around and dealing with the cells within Excel 365.

On the other hand, LO Writer and LO Calc very much evoke the user experience feeling of earlier generations of MS Office, and I use in particular Calc in connection with my job nearly every day. I've created a number of what I think of as "tools" using LO Calc. I've published many of these tools for others to use, and they all work perfectly as either Calc or Excel files. And just as with MS Office, I've used LO on Windows, macOS, as well as my daily driver OS of choice Linux Mint, so I can tell you for a fact that there's no performance difference I can detect between any of those platforms.

If I were you, I'd switch over (unless there's some specific thing tying you to MS Office) and call it a day.

I tried LibreOffice. And I can say I much, much prefer Microsoft Office, hands down. I think it has a much more streamlined interface, more features, and a performance (on Windows) that puts LibreOffice to shame.

Apart from preferring Microsoft Office, I also have to use it because of my work. LibreOffice does not perfectly support all the formatting of Word documents, and I need it to exchange files with my clients and peers. Plus, I need to exchange PowerPoint presentations, and I make extensive use of Outlook and Teams. Even if I wanted to (which I do not), I would not be able to go with LibreOffice.

 

[skaertus]

I consider myself a power Office 365 user. I am an accountant and I have some very complex financial models in Excel. Lookups, Pivot tables galore. There are only two people in the office with a Mac. I have a 16GB M1 MBA that I bought last year that replaced a 2016 15" MBP. The M1 MBA is around twice a fast as the MBP that it replaced. It runs the financial models well, much better than my work colleagues how are running Windows and Microsoft 365 on two years old Intel PC Laptops.

My advice if you want to save money is get a M1 MBA base model and upgrade the RAM to 16GB. If you prefer working on a larger screen get an external monitor. I use a 35" widescreen LG monitor and its a great setup as the monitor has a USB C connecter that plugs into the MBA and charges it as well as drives the LG Screen. That screen was £500 in the UK. That screen may be overkill for what you need, the Base MBA with 16GB RAM is £1199 in the UK.

I am also running the Beta ARM version of Windows 11 through parallels and that runs pretty well as well. I have got Office 365 for Windows set up on Windows Arm and it runs well, although I don't really use it. The Mac version does everything I need it to. However I can remember a few years ago before Microsoft really brought the Mac version of office up to scratch it was better to run Office on a virtual PC than use the Mac Version. Thankfully I don't need to do that any more as the Mac Version of Excel is now multi threaded.

Thanks. The thing is, the base M1 MacBook Air costs $2,600 at Apple store here in Brazil. I can find it at a discount in some retail stores. However, if I want to upgrade it with 16 GB (7 GPUs and 256 GB SSD), I have to necessarily buy it at Apple for the full price of $3,100.

 

[James_C]

Thanks. The thing is, the base M1 MacBook Air costs $2,600 at Apple store here in Brazil. I can find it at a discount in some retail stores. However, if I want to upgrade it with 16 GB (7 GPUs and 256 GB SSD), I have to necessarily buy it at Apple for the full price of $3,100.

Ouch that is expensive, I think you may be ok with 8GB, however if you are the type that likes to keep on to your Mac as long as you can, I think you should look at 16GB. Will any of the discount stores let you try for a couple of weeks and take it back if you feel that 8GB is not enough ?

 

[skaertus]

Ouch that is expensive, I think you may be ok with 8GB, however if you are the type that likes to keep on to your Mac as long as you can, I think you should look at 16GB. Will any of the discount stores let you try for a couple of weeks and take it back if you feel that 8GB is not enough ?

Well, if I buy it online law guarantees is a 7-day return policy, but many stores do not respect it and will only accept it back if the product is unused and inside the sealed box. So, once I buy it, I do not expect to be able to return it.

 

[Ethosik]

Do you need to run Outlook on your Mac. The built in apps can connect to an Exchange account?

I really don't like the built in Mail app.

 

[Joelist]

I run Office 365 (pro version) on an M1 MBA and to be honest it all runs perfectly - no issues. And extremely fast too.

 

[excelsior.ink]

I have the one time payment version of Office for Home 2019 (because I don't like renting my software) and it runs perfectly on M1 MBP, they are native arm64 apps. I have also Outlook 2019 but I don't use it anymore because search function does not return results correctly so I switched to using Mail. I tried Libre Office but it's not 100% compatible with Word/Excel/Powerpoint files and I need to exchange files with other people. If it wouldn't be this requirement I would use Apple's office apps, they are nice, but also not 100% compatible with Microsoft Office.

 

[ms82494]

I have an 8GB M1 Mac Mini running both Office 365 in Mac version and Windows version via Parallels. A fairly heavy Excel user I prefer the Windows version, so have set this as the default app to open .xlsx files. Two words: Runs. Fine.
I'd also add that if you use "Coherence Mode" in Parallels Windows Excel will act and feel pretty much like a native Mac app.

It's not always perfect though as Parallels tends to crash if the machine goes to sleep, but then you can just reopen and the beauty is you won't have lost your work as it's not the Excel app itself that crashed, but the Parallels VM that goes to sleep.

The last thing is - knowing what I know now - if I could go back in time 6 months I would have waited for 16GB to be available instead of settling for 8GB. Running a Parallels VM is better with the extra ram as it easily takes 5-6GB which means you'll be using swap really quickly. Most of the time it doesn't show on performance though, so mainly about having a bit extra to give. I'm quite amazed of what this entry machine can do!

I'm not the OP, but really appreciate this answer, as it seems to be the first to specifically address the question about using Office through Parallels. There simply are Excel features that don't exist in the Mac versions.

I already have an MBA M1 16GB, but just found out that the Mac version of Excel is inadequate for some of my work, making me wonder if Parallels might offer a solution. I am going to try. Thanks!

 

[PeterLC]

I'm not the OP, but really appreciate this answer, as it seems to be the first to specifically address the question about using Office through Parallels. There simply are Excel features that don't exist in the Mac versions.

I already have an MBA M1 16GB, but just found out that the Mac version of Excel is inadequate for some of my work, making me wonder if Parallels might offer a solution. I am going to try. Thanks!

I too appreciate what JPMLondon says, where we have the details about his configurations for each product's use. Most helpful. I also concur with ms82494 about some Excel features absent in the Mac version verses the Windows offering (but still billed out by MS at the same price). When you say, "... the Mac version of Excel is inadequate for some of my work ...", which platform/configuration are you running under; directly under M1 or under M1 > Parallels?

 

[PeterLC]

Standalone office is just a licensing option. The standalone version of Office on Windows is the same as the Office 365 version of Office on Windows. The standalone Mac version is the same as Office 365 on the Mac.

Thanks for this; I was not actually sure that the stand-alone Office for Mac was actually identical to Office/Microsoft 365 for Mac. This is helpful to know. What I continue to be disappointed in is the fact that, although MS charges the same price for their implied 'same' product, specifically Excel that I am familiar with, running under Windows verses running under the Mac, their products do not match in functionality. The Mac product does not have features that the Windows product offers and, as far as I know, no notice is offered explaining this to the public. Buyer beware.

 

[agpc]

I recently bought M1 macbook pro 16 in. tbh I have worst experience of Office 365 running in it especially word. It cant handle a single 100 paged report with numerous comments and edit versions. Crashing, design disasters, formatting issues, and many more. Somehow words in mac has issues with certain words and change them into some weired characters in the whole document. Also copy/paste pictures dissapears after several document savings..

now I am thinking to install Windows on the M1 system using Parallels and installing office 365.

If you want tor un office - run it on a windows system... Running Office applications on MacOS is a no go solution. You end up being frustrated and will give up soon, and start hating your Macbook.

 

[ADGrant]

I recently bought M1 macbook pro 16 in. tbh I have worst experience of Office 365 running in it especially word. It cant handle a single 100 paged report with numerous comments and edit versions. Crashing, design disasters, formatting issues, and many more. Somehow words in mac has issues with certain words and change them into some weired characters in the whole document. Also copy/paste pictures dissapears after several document savings..

now I am thinking to install Windows on the M1 system using Parallels and installing office 365.

If you want tor un office - run it on a windows system... Running Office applications on MacOS is a no go solution. You end up being frustrated and will give up soon, and start hating your Macbook.

Perhaps you document is using a font only available on Windows. I have had no issues with Word on Mac but I am not exactly a power user of Word and it is an Intel Mac. I have also used Excel on Mac and it works fine but I have not used it to open an Excel spreadsheet with VBA macros.

 

[Tagbert]

Honestly, I ran into such a horrible issue with Office it made my opinion of macOS worse. When I opened Outlook for the first time, the dock, menu bar and desktop icons would flash in and out like a strobe light whenever I moved my mouse. The contents of the "Sign In" or "Activate Office" dialog went blank and showed contents as a strobe light too. This happened every time I launched Outlook, so I could not activate Office or sign in to my 365 account. However, Word let me and once I was signed in I did not experience the issue.

I’m not sure what caused what you were experiencing then but it is not typical of installing Outlook or any other Office app from my experience on an M1 MBA.

 

[ADGrant]

I’m not sure what caused what you were experiencing then but it is not typical of installing Outlook or any other Office app from my experience on an M1 MBA.

I have not seen those kind of issues either. That said I have never installed Outlook on a Mac. I use the Windows version on my work PC and it is fairly clunky. I have heard the Mac version is worse.

 

[xraydoc]

I recently bought M1 macbook pro 16 in. tbh I have worst experience of Office 365 running in it especially word. It cant handle a single 100 paged report with numerous comments and edit versions. Crashing, design disasters, formatting issues, and many more. Somehow words in mac has issues with certain words and change them into some weired characters in the whole document. Also copy/paste pictures dissapears after several document savings..

now I am thinking to install Windows on the M1 system using Parallels and installing office 365.

If you want tor un office - run it on a windows system... Running Office applications on MacOS is a no go solution. You end up being frustrated and will give up soon, and start hating your Macbook.

While I’ll be the first to say that Office isn’t even close to being well-optimized for the Mac, I’ve not seen crashes and formatting issues on long or complex documents. Unless something is dependent on Windows-specific features or code (or a weird font), I’ve not experienced this. While I don’t have any 100 page documents, I routinely use 50+ page documents without any issues on my MacBook Air M1 and on my M1 iPad Pro.

 

[Tagbert]

I have not seen those kind of issues either. That said I have never installed Outlook on a Mac. I use the Windows version on my work PC and it is fairly clunky. I have heard the Mac version is worse.

It’s not bad on the Mac, but a few things are different or not there. The Mac Excel used to not be able to connect to Pivot Tables, but I hear that works now. Performance is not snappy on Intel Macs but as long as you’ve got enough RAM it’s fine. On an M1 Mac performance is good. I’ve never run into problems with large or complex documents or spreadsheets. As some have noted the initial startup time of the Mac Office is a little slower than Windows and that is even true on the M1. I think that there is some kind of validation process going on that takes extra time. It’s not bad and once I open an app, it usually stays open for most of the day. Startup time is never a metric by which I judge an app, though some use it because it is something that can be easily measured so it gets noted a lot.

 

[Ethosik]

I’m not sure what caused what you were experiencing then but it is not typical of installing Outlook or any other Office app from my experience on an M1 MBA.

I experience the weirdest issues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am just THAT lucky!

 

[James_C]

I’m not sure what caused what you were experiencing then but it is not typical of installing Outlook or any other Office app from my experience on an M1 MBA.

Yes, Fully agree I used an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM running office 365 for about a year, before I upgraded to a 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro when they were released. I work in a predominately Windows centric office. Only 2 of us use a Mac. I am a Finance Director so I use Excel more than Word. I have some large and sophisticated Excel Financial Models that I share with other Windows Users. I also created some large word documents, but maybe not as large as 100 pages, but these documents tend to have embedded graphics, tables and Excel objects. I have seen more stability on Office 365 on Mac than some of my Windows Co-Workers. So I agree with others that some of the problems @agpc is seeing is more likely to relate to the the document itself, rather than Office 365 for Mac in general.

 

[RedllowFenix]

Yes, Fully agree I used an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM running office 365 for about a year, before I upgraded to a 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro when they were released. I work in a predominately Windows centric office. Only 2 of us use a Mac. I am a Finance Director so I use Excel more than Word. I have some large and sophisticated Excel Financial Models that I share with other Windows Users. I also created some large word documents, but maybe not as large as 100 pages, but these documents tend to have embedded graphics, tables and Excel objects. I have seen more stability on Office 365 on Mac than some of my Windows Co-Workers. So I agree with others that some of the problems @agpc is seeing is more likely to relate to the the document itself, rather than Office 365 for Mac in general.

I consider myself a power Office 365 user. I am an accountant and I have some very complex financial models in Excel. Lookups, Pivot tables galore. There are only two people in the office with a Mac. I have a 16GB M1 MBA that I bought last year that replaced a 2016 15" MBP. The M1 MBA is around twice a fast as the MBP that it replaced. It runs the financial models well, much better than my work colleagues how are running Windows and Microsoft 365 on two years old Intel PC Laptops.

My advice if you want to save money is get a M1 MBA base model and upgrade the RAM to 16GB. If you prefer working on a larger screen get an external monitor. I use a 35" widescreen LG monitor and its a great setup as the monitor has a USB C connecter that plugs into the MBA and charges it as well as drives the LG Screen. That screen was £500 in the UK. That screen may be overkill for what you need, the Base MBA with 16GB RAM is £1199 in the UK.

I am also running the Beta ARM version of Windows 11 through parallels and that runs pretty well as well. I have got Office 365 for Windows set up on Windows Arm and it runs well, although I don't really use it. The Mac version does everything I need it to. However I can remember a few years ago before Microsoft really brought the Mac version of office up to scratch it was better to run Office on a virtual PC than use the Mac Version. Thankfully I don't need to do that any more as the Mac Version of Excel is now multi threaded.

I'm a little late to the party, but given your background and usage, perhaps you can advise me. Because I work in an investment banking division, Excel is used on a daily basis (financial modeling, valuation, due diligence). I consider myself an "expert," and I enjoy using advanced formulas (new array functions) and power query / power pivot.

My main concern is the functional and feature differences between the Mac OS and Windows versions. I was considering using Excel on Parallels 18 but the videos that I've seen so far don't look promising. Or maybe just stuck with a Windows Laptop.

What would you recommend me?

Thanks!

 

[cardfan]

I'm a little late to the party, but given your background and usage, perhaps you can advise me. Because I work in an investment banking division, Excel is used on a daily basis (financial modeling, valuation, due diligence). I consider myself an "expert," and I enjoy using advanced formulas (new array functions) and power query / power pivot.

My main concern is the functional and feature differences between the Mac OS and Windows versions. I was considering using Excel on Parallels 18 but the videos that I've seen so far don't look promising. Or maybe just stuck with a Windows Laptop.

What would you recommend me?

Thanks!

Windows laptop

 

[James_C]

I'm a little late to the party, but given your background and usage, perhaps you can advise me. Because I work in an investment banking division, Excel is used on a daily basis (financial modeling, valuation, due diligence). I consider myself an "expert," and I enjoy using advanced formulas (new array functions) and power query / power pivot.

My main concern is the functional and feature differences between the Mac OS and Windows versions. I was considering using Excel on Parallels 18 but the videos that I've seen so far don't look promising. Or maybe just stuck with a Windows Laptop.

What would you recommend me?

Thanks!

The new Dynamic Array functions are available in the Mac Version of Excel (Office 365), however the Mac Version does not have Power BI functionality at the moment.

I don't currently need to use Power BI, (I tended to use it as a data import facility), I tend to just use CSV files to import financial data into my models.

In a prior role I did need to use Power BI, and I used Parallels to run the Windows Version of Excel just to update the data, then switch back to the Mac Version.

If you are likely to use Power BI a lot then like @cardfan you will be better off with a PC.

 

[Mike Boreham]

I'm going to add to this that, as someone who owns many PCs, running the Windows Insider Preview version of Windows 10 for ARM64 on Parallels is an annoyingly messy experience.

I dont know about Windows 10, and I have only just seen this thread and thought someone would have commented on this but seems not.

On Nov 30th 2021 Parallels released version 17.1.1 which makes it very easy to download the production version of ARM Windows 11, not Insider, not Preview. Before that it had to be Insider Preview builds.