Office on Silicon

[Robert McNewbie]

The browser v version? Not sure what you are referring to. I use the browser version of Team for video conferences all day long. I've completely uninstalled the app from both my Windows and Mac machines.

What browser? or doesn't matter? (I mean performance wise, is same in any browser?) Currently I have the Teams App and I allow the Safari dialog to open the app. I also use Chrome. The issue I see here is being "online" and the app sitting, open, in the dock, with badge notifications sometimes. The browsers, I tend to Quit them every now and then through the day.

 

[abhi182]

Outlook Arm version works noticeably faster for me than a Windows 10th Gen i5 - It's completely lag free and has in some ways reinstated my faith in MS - That they can build good software if unencumbered by legacy code

Word and excel are as fast if not faster

Overall Office Arm is a noticeable improvement over the Intel Mac variant I used to use - which was nowhere as good to use as the Windows variant

 

[Leon1das]

Resurrecting an old thread here. I've just installed Office on my new MBA M1, and can see that while the main apps are all Apple Silicon native, OneDrive is still showing as Intel in the Activity Viewer.

OneDrive is currently being a total pig - unresponsive beachball most of the time - but was wondering whether there is an Apple Silicon version in the fast track/insider track option for users? I've never used anything other than the standard releases of Office, but OneDrive is driving me bananas.

Are they Silicon native or Universal? Thanks

 

[chrfr]

Are they Silicon native or Universal? Thanks

The Office apps are universal. Teams and OneDrive are only Intel native at this time.

 

[DeanL]

[...] OneDrive are only Intel native at this time.

Is OneDrive still only Intel even in the Insider-fast stream?

 

[chrfr]

Is OneDrive still only Intel even in the Insider-fast stream?

Yes, there's only Intel versions available.

 

[Aggedor]

What browser? or doesn't matter? (I mean performance wise, is same in any browser?) Currently I have the Teams App and I allow the Safari dialog to open the app. I also use Chrome. The issue I see here is being "online" and the app sitting, open, in the dock, with badge notifications sometimes. The browsers, I tend to Quit them every now and then through the day.

Ah, yeah, if you quit the browser but you also need to stay online, that can be a pain! I use Edge Chromium in Windows 10 and Safari on the MBA. I tend not to need Teams notifications, so perhaps that's the difference.

 

[darkharbour]

Oh really? I've just tried it on my M! MBA and it won't activate the camera (even using Edge as a browser). I'll investigate further, but good to know it works for some, so there is hope.

 

[ajaan]

Ah, yeah, if you quit the browser but you also need to stay online, that can be a pain! I use Edge Chromium in Windows 10 and Safari on the MBA. I tend not to need Teams notifications, so perhaps that's the difference.

Using Teams and the whole Office Suit in Brave here at the moment. Prefer it over the Teams app. And the Office365/Teams page with all your recent docs is not badly done. Plus growing to like Word in the Cloud. Especially with multiple docs / open across tabs. The whole syncing docs and spreadsheets etc between Teams, desktop Office app, browser tab has been implemented pretty well -- just a bit more speed needed.

Wouldn't work properly with Safari though, some permissions issues for some Teams features. Brave is M1 now.

 

[Aggedor]

Using Teams and the whole Office Suit in Brave here at the moment. Prefer it over the Teams app. And the Office365/Teams page with all your recent docs is not badly done. Plus growing to like Word in the Cloud. Especially with multiple docs / open across tabs. The whole syncing docs and spreadsheets etc between Teams, desktop Office app, browser tab has been implemented pretty well -- just a bit more speed needed.

Wouldn't work properly with Safari though, some permissions issues for some Teams features. Brave is M1 now.

What's Brave?

 

[theSeb]

What's Brave?

A browser.

The browser that puts you first | Brave

The Brave browser is a fast, private and secure web browser for PC, Mac and mobile. Download now to enjoy a faster ad-free browsing experience that saves data and battery life by blocking tracking software.

brave.com

 

[DeanL]

Yes, there's only Intel versions available.

I'm starting to think that Microsoft is re-writing OneDrive for Mac...

 

[darknetone]

I loaded HUP Office 2019 yesterday, on my MBP 16GB RAM, it runs fine, loaded up a 524 page document, was easily able to move around in it. Tried a huge spreadsheet (15K Rows and 17 col)and it ran quite well. So far all seems to be running quite nicely! Now I am hoping that Hitfilm will hurry up with their M1 version, and yes, according to an email exchange they are working on it. - I will be loading ToS tonight, it will probably be a rosetta app as I have yet to hear of a native ot universal coded version.

 

[Susurs]

It (2019) used to hang up and quit quite often on my M1 with even medium size documents when I do multiple TC / Comments. Reduced autosave time to few minutes in order to not loose data.

 

[NintendoRev]

So far for me, cold launch speed is hugely improved and overall responsiveness has been great compared to the rosetta version. Then again, anything on the M1 has been amazing compared to my Late 2013 iMac, even rosetta. Waiting 3 minutes to launch word was depressing.

 

[ADGrant]

Does anyone have any word on when Teams might be updated to ARM? I'm tired of having to constantly run a non-native app for work all day, it works fine but is definitely more of a resource drain than it should be. Given how much better Outlook, Excel, and Word got with native support, I'm anxious to see Teams and OneDrive join the fray.

Outlook, Excel and Word are native apps written mostly in C++. Teams is an Electron app that basically runs in a chromium browser. It's a resource drain on any machine, macOS or Windows, Intel or M1.

 

[Nihilvor]

Office, and especially Word (optimized for Apple silicone), are insane memory hogs on M1. This is a freaking word processor; it shouldn't be forcing swap memory to be active on my 16gb M1, but it's the leading contributor.

 

[ADGrant]

Office, and especially Word (optimized for Apple silicone), are insane memory hogs on M1. This is a freaking word processor; it shouldn't be forcing swap memory to be active on my 16gb M1, but it's the leading contributor.

View attachment 1755460

That is weird. Its taking 235mb on my Intel Mac. Much less than Safari.

 

[Ultron]

Office, and especially Word (optimized for Apple silicone), are insane memory hogs on M1. This is a freaking word processor; it shouldn't be forcing swap memory to be active on my 16gb M1, but it's the leading contributor.

View attachment 1755460

What kind of monster document are you working on? I regularly use Word on my M1 Mac and never reach anywhere near that level of memory use. A blank page document, for example, only takes ~160MB of memory.

 

[Nihilvor]

What kind of monster document are you working on? I regularly use Word on my M1 Mac and never reach anywhere near that level of memory use. A blank page document, for example, only takes ~160MB of memory.

Are you using the new Office 2019 (16.47)? This isn't the subscription version. It will take up 1.2gb for one document. Excel is always around 1gb. In this case I have ten documents open, but none over seven pages in length.

It also seems to matter how long Office is open (it's always open here). It could have a serious memory leak in the current version.

 

[Nihilvor]

I've done some additional tests, and it does appear to be a memory issue with 16.47.

I had a small, 17k file open up (among others) that I closed after maybe four days of it being in the background. As soon as I closed it, the memory usage in Word wend down an entire GB. When I opened it back up again, they memory usage did not go back up to where it was. Still, it was close to 2gbs in total for the five documents. Hopefully, the next version of Word addresses some of this issue.

 

[Nihilvor]

That is weird. Its taking 235mb on my Intel Mac. Much less than Safari.

How many documents do you have up? Word easily grabs another 240mb for every additional 16k document I open. Try bringing up seven to ten smallish documents and wait to see what it does after thirty minutes or so.

When I was running Office 2016 on an older Mac a few weeks ago, it never got anywhere close to the 3+ gbs I end up using with light office work.

 

[Ultron]

Are you using the new Office 2019 (16.47)? This isn't the subscription version. It will take up 1.2gb for one document. Excel is always around 1gb. In this case I have ten documents open, but none over seven pages in length.

It also seems to matter how long Office is open (it's always open here). It could have a serious memory leak in the current version.

I am using 16.47 but I have the Office 365 subscription, so maybe that's the difference?

 

[xraydoc]

I've done some additional tests, and it does appear to be a memory issue with 16.47.

I had a small, 17k file open up (among others) that I closed after maybe four days of it being in the background. As soon as I closed it, the memory usage in Word wend down an entire GB. When I opened it back up again, they memory usage did not go back up to where it was. Still, it was close to 2gbs in total for the five documents. Hopefully, the next version of Word addresses some of this issue.

Are you using the Mac App Store version or the direct download from Microsoft? There may be differences there as well, despite the app itself being at the same version number.
I've got the App Store version installed (365 subscription activated) and Word v 16.47. But opening a few test documents doesn't get me anywhere near that level of RAM usage.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

I have the Mac App Store versions and all are resource hogs. Even now I have Excel active with two basic spreadsheets, a couple of SUM formulas each and around 50 rows... 2.8gb RAM.

My workflow is keep everything personal on Numbers and everything business/work related (grudgingly) on Excel.