Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Who is using Microsoft software with the M series Macs?
- Thread starter The point and shoot pro
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Tagbert
macrumors 604
Tagbert
macrumors 604
I tried to use MS Teams for video calls with some customers who use that. The problem was that while my company uses OneDrive for storing files, we don’t have Teams on the account. (We are a Slack/Zoom house). I tried to use my personal outlook account to sign in to Teams since it doesn’t allow guest access. Teams then decide that my personal outlook account had to be used for Onedrive, too and replaced my work OneDrive account. It took two days to fully reverse that fiasco. Since then, I only use Teams in Edge for calls and that is all I use Edge for. Hard to tell if it has gotten better.
vigilant
macrumors 6502a
I have used Office on the Mac for probably 15 years. Mind you, given my profession, arguments can be made if I’m a “Hardcore” Office guy. But it is a tool that’s part of my trade.
Largely, I find that anything that can be done on the Windows side can be done on the Mac side. There are a small handful of specifics I should mention. If someone builds a locked down document in Word, with selected areas that can be changed by anyone you are good. But if you need to edit the locked down portion, even if you have the password to do it, the prompt doesn’t come up like it does in Windows. For this, I simply have a VM with Windows, and it’s like a very mild inconvenience. I don’t know the specifics on this last one, but VBA Macros have awkward limitations. One of which is something having to do with querying multiple databases at the same time, and filtering through rows based off very specific parameters during a join? The wife told me about that one. You can run it on a Mac supposedly, but if something goes wrong you can’t debug it. My guess is Microsoft is overly leveraging the ability to expose outside data sets into Windows based on Win32 and they never bothered to create their implementation on Mac.
Even the iPad versions of these apps are pretty good. The one major caveat is Excel allows for the editing of Pivot Tables, but not the creation. Outside of that, I’m not aware of any hang ups there.
Within a year or so, just about all of the Microsoft 365 apps will be based on the same code base and use some sort of HTML-Front End wrapper for the different implementations of this. I believe that’s how “New Outlook” works today on Mac.
Any way, always feel free to reach out to the community. In my household, the only use for a Windows device is for gaming. That’s it. I personally loathe Windows and use it as an overarchitected boot loader for Steam.
OneDrive works as you would expect. All the other apps 99% work as you’d expect (for the overwhelmingly large part of the population). If I change a file outside of a Microsoft app, Onedrive notices it, and syncs changes up. File On Demand works as you would expect (i don’t use this feature now, but have for years. I prefer Spotlight to have everything indexed so I can always do a search to find documents).
But yeah, edge cases exist. I don’t think most of the population will ever run into them. Even if they do it’s an issue that might happen like 1 time per year. It’s far better than doing something in Google Docs, downloading it as a Word doc, then trying to copy and past the text into a company based template that some how makes everything fall apart no matter what platform you are on.
MrGunny94
macrumors 65816
Yeah! I have heard stories like yours when it involves multiple accounts to quickly become a mess on macOS.. Hoping they revamp this.
victoriani
macrumors regular
I use Windows for work, and I am a power Excel user, using Pivot Tables and Macros/ VBA within my work. Personally, I use Mac. I have noticed that Excel for Mac does not have as many developer tools as the Windows version does, which is quite annoying. I am hoping this will be rectified in the near future. At this moment in time, I do find Excel for Windows easier to use than Excel for Mac, but hopefully that will change once they bridge more gaps for power users 🙂
uller6
macrumors 65816
Excel is still limited to 65,000 entries per column limit; this is incredibly frustrating and makes excel kind of useless for all but the most basic data analysis.
Agreed. Of all the MS Office programs, Excel is the one I find the hardest to replace. After using it professionally for 25+ years on Windows, I struggle with alternatives and am disappointed by the mis-match in feature sets between Mac and Windows.
Python can easily replace Excel and do a whole lot more on top of it.
Last edited:
uller6
macrumors 65816
But then you need to know Python and can’t use a GUI. Python is definitely not an easy replacement. And plotting in Python is only marginally better than plotting in Excel.
Silly suggestion. 99% of the excel users on the planet don't know what python is never mind how to use it.
What is silly is paying for Excel while Python and R is superior and it is free.
Tagbert
macrumors 604
uller6
macrumors 65816
I used to teach a large introductory college science course at a major public university. We spent an entire class period teaching how to do basic math (addition, subtraction, averages, etc) in excel. After an hour even something like 10% of students still couldn’t figure this out. Python would be an absolute nightmare.
Sure, if you’re a programmer then things are different, but that’s a very small fraction of the general population, probably < 1%.
I'm a programmer, have used python, and I'd still use excel for any personal stuff. Anything that saves time... I've been using it since a college physics course. (really)
Saves time - yes! I had a PhD student once that took a month to set up a r script for analysing some data (OK it was part of his general PhD training but a month!). An excel user would to the same thing in a few hours at best. I looked at his script and the risk of bugs and therefore errors in the analysis was high. Know your tools strength and weakness and when to apply the correct tool. The current mantra of is that move advanced tool you use, the better the outcome. "r" vs Excel. Inventor vs Fusion 360. Latex vs Word. At my engineering university r, inventor and latex is preferred even if they are poorer choices for the tasks because these softwares are considered more advanced or in MR language more "pro".
uller6
macrumors 65816
You’re absolutely right. I spent a couple months in grad school teaching myself latex because of the beautiful typesetting and better figure/math handling than word. Then, of course, my PhD advisor ran their group on Word. And then my post doc advisor ran their group on Word. And now my research group runs on Word for simplicity, speed, and interoperability. Of the ~50 papers I’ve published, only 1 has been written in latex, all others written in word. Sigh. The world is full of tradeoffs and sometimes the best tool for the job is not always the best tool.
I am not so much of a bully and my philosophy is that people should chose the tools they feel most comfortable with (but not drawing too much on the chronic low funds). However, I demand that they export into formats that can be imported into Word for editing by me. Likewise, I demand that students exports editable formats that can be imported into fusion360.
andeify
macrumors 6502
I don’t think the Mac version of MS apps are very well written, that said I haven’t used them for years.
I have to use Access and Excel for work so I run Windows 11 Arm in a Parallels VM. It boots in less than 5 seconds on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. I can use my works 365 login details since I’m using it for work and it’s nice to keep work and everything else separate from my Mac.
The performance is incredible and battery life is surprisingly good considering what it’s doing. I would recommend this method for working with MS apps, however there are a few things that you can’t do with the Arm version of windows as not all 3rd party programs work.
I have to use Access and Excel for work so I run Windows 11 Arm in a Parallels VM. It boots in less than 5 seconds on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. I can use my works 365 login details since I’m using it for work and it’s nice to keep work and everything else separate from my Mac.
The performance is incredible and battery life is surprisingly good considering what it’s doing. I would recommend this method for working with MS apps, however there are a few things that you can’t do with the Arm version of windows as not all 3rd party programs work.
Last edited:
What about 3rd party devices? Can't seem to find an ARM-compatible driver for my WLAN USB adapter.
SnowCrocodile
macrumors 6502a
They are written well enough, I'd say. I use Onenote, Excel, Word, Outlook, Teams and Onedrive on a daily basis. Out of these, Onenote has probably the least feature parity with its Windows counterpart, but they are all pretty workable on Mac.