Microsoft Office365 on MacOS! | How Well Does It Work?

19 Comments on Microsoft Office365 on MacOS! | How Well Does It Work?

1. One feature I miss in office for Mac, is the mini toolbar that pops up using windows computers. Also miss the different paste options directly from right click and paste.

2. For the 90% of users Numbers, Pages and Keynote are good enough. If you work with Office in a Corporate environment, Office 365 on a Mac is a must at home. What Office 365 lacks on Mac are most of the Power Tools for Excel, Power Query is way behind from Windows. And let’s not talk on Power Bi, a Windows exclusive tool.

   • Haha, yes I was just going to mention the ‘Power’ side of things. PowerBI must be on the roadmap for ARM

   • Pages is quite nice. I prefer Keynote over Powerpoint any day. Numbers however has always be working against me and I have never found any use for it. It’s just not a good spreadsheet app.

   • That’s what i noticed. For someone like me, Excel is useless without Power Query.

     Constantly updating reports throughout the day.

3. I have been using Microsoft Word on the Macintosh since about 1987 or ’88. I have used full-blown Office on the Mac since about 2001. (My primary Office product has consistently been Word, but I’ve also used Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage. Over the past few years, I started using Office 365, so I also started using OneDrive, OneNote and Outlook. Office 365 is great, providing that you don’t let your subscription lapse because you change credit cards. I recently acquired an M1 Mac Mini, which runs circles around my 2013-vintage Core i5 iMac. The only issue with the M1 Mini is making sure all of the drivers for peripherals work properly. So far, I’m partially satisfied that the M1 Mini can use my ancient HP LaserJet 4100N network printer, but some of the functionality is gone (can no longer turn down the print resolution) and sometimes a print job (even a simple one) is extremely slow. Also: my Epson Perfection V.39 scanner works, but not very well; the Epson scanning software frequently crashes, making it unreliable.

4. I think the big three Office Apps are Word, Excel, and Outlook.

   I work with many clients and PowerPoint is used, but not nearly as much as Outlook. Recently MS has been making modifications to Outlook also. The new Outlook has a more pleasing sophisticated look but it is buggy as hell. At one point people were receiving updates that completely made their mail disappear. One of the worst weeks I’ve had with people constantly calling with “ALL MY EMAIL IS GONE!” Luckily all we had to do is revert to the “Legacy Outlook” and everything returned to normal.

   I also get the impression that MS is sort of shepherding the enterprise toward their cloud based Office apps. I recently helped a law firm onboard dozens of law clerks from a high end law school and all these kids were accustomed to using the web version of Outlook. Many had never seen the app before.

   Also what’s goin on with this new Office 365 app? One app has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Not sure if it has Teams or not. Gotta get with my Microsoft guy and get a clear explanation.

   There is a single app for Windows and one for iOS, but the map still has separate apps. I just wonder what’s going on in this space.

   Today’s Outlook Problem? One big boss type is sending out mail, but the messages are blank. As always, zillions of reports on this type of problem, but no real solution.

5. Very good exploration of MS 365 basic applications on MacBook. Kindly continue doing so for most of MS 365 applications. I extend my best wishes for the same.

6. Given the power and similarity of the Mac products, it makes absolutely no sense to pay Microsoft a monthly/yearly stipend to use their products when the Mac products are absolutely free. This is especially true for any business. Also the conversion from Microsoft format to Mac works extremely well so working with any office product is very easy with a Mac.

7. Ms excel will be good when MS finally enhances power query functionality like in windows. Indeed, they’re moving in this direction, however if you require the full functionality (including vba and power query) you’ll have to switch to windows.

8. Fun fact: If you open the VBA macro editor in Excel while the Excel window itslef is not on your first monitor, the macro editor will open off-screen on your first monitor and essentially soft-lock your Excel unless you shut it down via the activity monitor

9. For me as a Mac user who used office suite on both Mac and windows I know for number it’s lacking with some tool, although I don’t use excel, the thing I like the most with the MAC version is the UI design of the toolbar it looks so much more modern and more intuitive instead of multiple drop down menus on the windows side. Once you get the hang of what all the symbols mean, or use the search tool, it’s easy to do things like change the proofreading language, etc.

10. First class review. Been running Microsoft apps on a Mac since the “demise” of WordPerfect for Mac – started on a PowerBook 3400.

11. Thanks – didn’t know that by going to the MS website does not give me the M1 version of my Office365 apps until I watched this – will uninstall then install from App Store. Please continue with this series – be really interested in MS Teams (which on my MBP does not have share screen working, unbelievably). Cheers!

12. I have been using Microsoft Office apps smoothly across iPhone, iPad, iMac and MacBook Pro. Teams behaves very unpredictably. Looking forward to your video on that and perhaps also one on what and how much to expect from Office on iPad. Thank you!

13. Excellent overview Fernando. I hope you do more videos like this. I rarely see any people in business using the Apple productivity software on their Macs. I like the Apple apps but it caused issues with collaboration since there are no cross platform capabilities. It ended up killing my productivity.

14. Most of the things are there but I think it’s not as easy to use on MacOS as on Windows.

15. UI on Mac version may be prettier but less usable IMHO. E.g. Outlook can’t display more than the bare minimum of columns unless you turn off reading pane, doesn’t show no. of emails in folder, etc. I’m used to the keyboard shortcuts in the Widows version of Excel and the absence on them on the Mac version really affects productivity. At the end, Windows version of Office still is more suited for the pro / hard core corporate worker IMHO.

16. One feature I miss in Office for Mac is the side scrolling ability in Word. In the Windows variant you get this ability, with a nice ‘book reading’ animation as the pages are turned. It sucks that feature is missing from the Mac version of Word.