Office for Mac finally has real-time collaboration in 16.9.0 update

Office will share a codebase across all platforms of the first time in 20 years.

Read the whole story

 

[biscuitsandcookies]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

Omnigraffle works on iPad and imports and exports to Visio.

In-app purchases and $99 cost to circumvent the App store policy/pricing = no deal.

$99 (mac version sold seperately) is about the same as I would be paying per year for the entire MS Office suite on every platform i own. Their pricing is taking the piss.

What Office plan includes Visio? I don't have Visio rights with my O365 plan, and the cheapest one I can find is $15 per month on top of that.

 

[CraigJ ✅]

What does Microsoft Office have that cannot be replaced by Libreoffice and Google Docs?

Lots. How much time do you have?

 

[CraigJ ✅]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

Omnigraffle works on iPad and imports and exports to Visio.

In-app purchases and $99 cost to circumvent the App store policy/pricing = no deal.

$99 (mac version sold seperately) is about the same as I would be paying per year for the entire MS Office suite on every platform i own. Their pricing is taking the piss.

What Office plan includes Visio? I don't have Visio rights with my O365 plan, and the cheapest one I can find is $15 per month on top of that.

I think Visio is always an add on - I don't think any plans include it. https://products.office.com/en-us/compa ... ucts?tab=2

We have O-365 premium subscriptions ($12.50), and adding Visio would more than double a subscription as far as I can tell.

Being on a Mac it doesn't work anyway - OmniGraffe is probably the best solution for Macs. https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/

 

[InfiniteWisdom]

2018 and people still pay for an office suite.

 

[ewelch]

The Mac version of Office has often lagged behind Windows in features (some periods have been better than others) but this change could lay the groundwork for better parity moving forward.

That's not quite right.

What really happened is they alternated releases (Office 2000 was Windows only, Office 2001 was Mac only, 2003 Windows only, 2004 Mac only, etc) and often one of the releases would get a feature that wouldn't make it to the other platform until the next release or sometimes multiple releases.

It will be interesting to see if that situation improves or not. Having a shared code base doesn't necessarily mean they will be released at the same time with the same features.

Except it is right - There are some (admittedly rarely used) features in the Windows version that aren't on the Mac version. I'm not just talking VB stuff either.

Hopefully they avoid the pitfalls of Office 95. The File Save code was a horribly slow disaster.

No, it is as he said, not quite right. For example, the preview of the next slide in PowerPoint was in the Mac version before it was in the Windows version. I was at a demo by Microsoft's Office for Mac developers and they talked about how new features alternated between the Mac and PC version for being introduced first on one or the other.

Of course, some things were always newer and better on the PC side. No question. But the point was made by Microsoft themselves. I don't think you can argue with them about it.

 

[ewelch]

2018 and people still pay for an office suite.

2018 and some people still think open source means more secure.

 

[Shadowself]

Does this mean Excel for the Mac finally gets 'Find All'?

If the Mac starts to get basic features like that, then the Windows version of Office should get basic Mac features, like per-monitor DPI awareness. Fair's fair.

Thats an OS problem, caused by Microsoft half-assing display scaling.

I was one of those who questioned WTF Apple were doing with the retina scaling on the Mac, back when it came out (render internally at 2x the retina res and then scale back to real display size via GPU) - but at the end of the day, it works. Microsoft display scaling simply does not.

Microsoft has managed to update Powerpoint and Skype For Business to be somewhat DPI-aware.

The rest of Office is lagging behind, though, and still suffers if used on two monitors with different scaling (e.g. a laptop display and an external monitor).

Microsoft is promising that a fix will eventually come, but "due to the pervasiveness of the changes involved", it will only be available to Office 365 users:
https://support.office.com/en-us/articl ... ab8bcfe44f

"due to the pervasiveness of the changes involved", it will only be available to Office 365 users..."

I a word: BULLSHIT. If they can do it in 365 they can do it in 2016 (and 2018/2019, if that ever exists). It is a marketing decision with this feature (and others) to get Office users to jump to a protection racket (sorry, "subscription") model.

 

[yeppers]

The Mac version of Office has often lagged behind Windows in features (some periods have been better than others) but this change could lay the groundwork for better parity moving forward.

That's not quite right.

What really happened is they alternated releases (Office 2000 was Windows only, Office 2001 was Mac only, 2003 Windows only, 2004 Mac only, etc) and often one of the releases would get a feature that wouldn't make it to the other platform until the next release or sometimes multiple releases.

It will be interesting to see if that situation improves or not. Having a shared code base doesn't necessarily mean they will be released at the same time with the same features.

Its clear you never really used Office on one of those platforms. Or rather, never really used any advanced features at the very least.

The version numbers and dates on the software do not indicate feature level superiority or even parity - they were two very different products.

they were different code-bases, and Office 2004 (for example) was way behind in terms of feature-set compared to Office 2003 on the PC.

Office 2011 (and 2008) from memory didn't even include VBA.

Office 2011 supported VBA. It was actually a decent course correction after the turd that was 2008, and from what I understand 2014 iterated upon it further. They've surely been moving in this direction for many years.

 

[jayhawksean]

Practically a footnote is the snippet that appeals to me the most, "Outlook gets support for swipe gestures and, critically, Google Contacts and Calendars support."

 

[raxadian]

2018 and people still pay for an office suite.

2018 and some people still think open source means more secure.

And Office is segure since when? Word been plagued by viruses since Word 6.0

 

[leet]

Still: Everyone knows that the best version of Word ever on any platform was Word 5.1 for the Mac. Right?

You are oh so wrong...but only because you forgot about Word 5.1a.

 

[lalato]

Crossing fingers (and toes, and legs, and eyes) that this somehow means that PowerPivot comes to the Mac.

 

[Ogre_]

What does Microsoft Office have that cannot be replaced by Libreoffice and Google Docs?

Lots. How much time do you have?

The features most people care about have been broadly available across competitive products for years. If you are a specialist (Accountant, transcriptionist), maybe you care about having a million features, but the rest of the world? Not nearly as much.

 

[mert]

The Mac version of Office has often lagged behind Windows in features (some periods have been better than others) but this change could lay the groundwork for better parity moving forward.

That's not quite right.

What really happened is they alternated releases (Office 2000 was Windows only, Office 2001 was Mac only, 2003 Windows only, 2004 Mac only, etc) and often one of the releases would get a feature that wouldn't make it to the other platform until the next release or sometimes multiple releases.

It will be interesting to see if that situation improves or not. Having a shared code base doesn't necessarily mean they will be released at the same time with the same features.

Its clear you never really used Office on one of those platforms. Or rather, never really used any advanced features at the very least.

The version numbers and dates on the software do not indicate feature level superiority or even parity - they were two very different products.

they were different code-bases, and Office 2004 (for example) was way behind in terms of feature-set compared to Office 2003 on the PC.

Office 2011 (and 2008) from memory didn't even include VBA.

Office 2011 supported VBA. It was actually a decent course correction after the turd that was 2008, and from what I understand 2014 iterated upon it further. They've surely been moving in this direction for many years.

Do you mean 2016? There was no Mac Office 2014.

 

[tepui]

We use both G Suite and Office 365 at our company; everyone gets a G Suite account, and a subset of those users who deal with the outside world also get an Office 365 login. I'm glad there's now feature parity for the office tools across devices, but MS still needs to address their exceptionally confusing product matrix as it relates to collaboration.

As an example: You probably have a personal MS account (if you have an Xbox, personal PC, etc.). For an organization of any size, you're probably going to use an Active Directory for account management, and this will either be on-premises or hosted by Azure AD. If you have a machine that's freshly configured with Windows 10 Pro, there joining the AD is relatively simple. BUT... If you purchase a commodity laptop with Windows 10 Home, you have to first login with your personal MS account (or create a local only account), upgrade the machine to Pro, then join the AD. This invariably creates a personal account on the machine that it can take some effort to decondition less experienced users to use. Obviously, if you have an IT department in-house, your level of headache here may be less, but we're a small shop and don't.

For extra giggles, the AD account is not a "Microsoft Account", and doesn't allow you to access certain services. Until very recently, one of those services was all of MSDN, which required you to additionally create a "Microsoft Account" with the same username (typically email) as the AD account, just to use MSDN. This has now been fixed by MS (with an accompanying means, finally, to de-duplicate the accounts), but for a while our devs had a personal MS account for machine setup, a "Microsoft Account" using their work email for MSDN, and an "Office 365/AD" account for the AD and Office sub. Fun.

Then, to really cap things off, MS differentiates between OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Sharepoint on premises, and Sharepoint hosted. Not all collaboration models are supported across all of these services. To be fair, this was also an issue with G Suite until Google rolled out Team Drives last year, essentially deprecating the vanilla version of Drive for business users. This has massively simplified our team management, and is an issue still present in Office.

No perfect solution, obviously. Our biggest remaining thorn with G Suite is that offline backups are somewhere between a pain, and technically impossible.

 

[TylerH]

Hurrah for this, but how about they bring the codebase of 365 up to par with desktop? For example, Office 365 has been out for years now, and you still can't zoom in or out of Excel Online documents.

The Mac version of Office has often lagged behind Windows in features (some periods have been better than others) but this change could lay the groundwork for better parity moving forward.

That's not quite right.

What really happened is they alternated releases (Office 2000 was Windows only, Office 2001 was Mac only, 2003 Windows only, 2004 Mac only, etc) and often one of the releases would get a feature that wouldn't make it to the other platform until the next release or sometimes multiple releases

Actually it is pretty right. Office 2016 for Mac didn't have VBA support. The most you got was literally a trumped up notepad. When I learned of that I immediately downgraded my work Macbook Pro to Office 2011.

 

[rick*d]

So is this because it is written in C# and Microsoft has finally polished up their .NET Core, etc?

More likely it's because they now have six versions instead of two, so being as unified as possible is critical.

Traditional Windows, Modern Windows (is that still a thing?), Mac, iOS, Android, HTML5/ChromeOS.

What astounds me is that it took them 20 years. I never understood why MS Office for Mac didn't start with the Windows codebase to begin with. It should have been shared code from Day One.

 

[rick*d]

What does Microsoft Office have that cannot be replaced by Libreoffice and Google Docs?

Niche features and backwards compatibility for obscure crap in the .DOCX format that only MS Office can render. But if you are an all-Libre company you probably won't miss any of it and at worst will need ONE PC with MS Office so you can open the very rare file that LibreOffice cannot.

There's only one thing* I've found personally that MS Word does better than LibreOffice, and there's a workaround. Frankly, making it work in MS Word is a workaround, too, so for me it's a wash.

* footnotes on the short edge of the paper even when the page is in landscape, so when the document is printed the page numbers are all at the bottom as bound, even on the pages you're expected to turn sideways to read.

 

[JamesBrickley]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

OmniGraffle blows Visio away and yes, there is a Mac and iOS version. The Pro version is required to exchange Visio files. The iPad can access OneDrive, DropBox, etc.
https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/ios/

 

[gkorper]

So is this because it is written in C# and Microsoft has finally polished up their .NET Core, etc?

More likely it's because they now have six versions instead of two, so being as unified as possible is critical.

Traditional Windows, Modern Windows (is that still a thing?), Mac, iOS, Android, HTML5/ChromeOS.

What astounds me is that it took them 20 years. I never understood why MS Office for Mac didn't start with the Windows codebase to begin with. It should have been shared code from Day One.

Maybe because Microsoft office for Mac was created first. In the case of MS Word nearly 5 years before.

 

[cyber-monk]

OMG, has it been that long?

I used to be a developer support engineer for the "Visual C++ Cross platform Development for Mac" way back in the mid 90s. As I understand it the development kit was built so they could have a single code base for Office. While it was quite impressive it had some bugs. You could write Win32 apps and cross compile them into native apps on the Mac.

Man I'm getting old..

 

[Tagbert]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Check out Omnigraffle

 

[rx2]

In some ways, the Mac version has been ahead. For example, highlight text in an email and hit reply or forward. You're only sending that, not the entire message or thread.

I do this all the time on Windows. This can't be done on Android/iOS/365?

Edit: Just forgot I switched back to Thunderbird (bolted when I heard Mozilla was cutting development and had no idea until recently that is no longer the case) and was thinking of that.

 

[rick*d]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

OmniGraffle blows Visio away and yes, there is a Mac and iOS version. The Pro version is required to exchange Visio files. The iPad can access OneDrive, DropBox, etc.
https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/ios/

In the past when my employeer was too cheap to buy Visio I used yEd:

yEd is a powerful desktop application that can be used to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams.
Create diagrams manually, or import your external data for analysis. Our automatic layout algorithms arrange even large data sets with just the press of a button.

yEd is freely available and runs on all major platforms: Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac OS X.

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

Edit: Oops, I see you're looking specifically for the iPad. Sorry.

 

[karolus]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

Omnigraffle works on iPad and imports and exports to Visio.

In-app purchases and $99 cost to circumvent the App store policy/pricing = no deal.

$99 (mac version sold seperately) is about the same as I would be paying per year for the entire MS Office suite on every platform i own. Their pricing is taking the piss.

What Office plan includes Visio? I don't have Visio rights with my O365 plan, and the cheapest one I can find is $15 per month on top of that.

I think Visio is always an add on - I don't think any plans include it. https://products.office.com/en-us/compa ... ucts?tab=2

We have O-365 premium subscriptions ($12.50), and adding Visio would more than double a subscription as far as I can tell.

Being on a Mac it doesn't work anyway - OmniGraffe is probably the best solution for Macs. https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/

Another good Mac-only option is Sketch. New license is $100, and a good value. License is perpetual.

 

[rx2]

I'd like it if Windows Outlook got the "View Source" ability that Mac outlook has, and I really hope that they don't eliminate it from the Mac.

I can do a "View Source" on Windows Outlook 2016 by context clicking and selecting "View Source". Or you speaking about another view source?

 

[rick*d]

So is this because it is written in C# and Microsoft has finally polished up their .NET Core, etc?

More likely it's because they now have six versions instead of two, so being as unified as possible is critical.

Traditional Windows, Modern Windows (is that still a thing?), Mac, iOS, Android, HTML5/ChromeOS.

What astounds me is that it took them 20 years. I never understood why MS Office for Mac didn't start with the Windows codebase to begin with. It should have been shared code from Day One.

Maybe because Microsoft office for Mac was created first. In the case of MS Word nearly 5 years before.

OK, so why didn't WinWord start with the Word for Mac codebase? It's clear that neither began from the Word for DOS codebase.

 

[rick*d]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

I have a Dell Latitude 7350 tablet running Windows 10 and it's not garbage. I'm using it now.
Do you consider the Surface Pro garbage, too? You do know the tablet market is all over the map, right? Some are great, some are garbage. If you pay iPad prices you're hard pressed to find garbage from any manufacturer.

 

[NickBII]

Question for a finance type: Does this mean the kind of feature parity that would allow someone in Treasury services to switch to OS X?

Last time my parents were looking for a laptop they asked for advice. They need build quality, and user-friendly tech support. They only really use spreadsheets, word processing, email, and their browser. So a Mac would be ideal. Especially the part where things break and instead of having to deal with some phone center they can just drive to the Apple store.

But she is in Treasury, so she needs the finance-geek feature-set, so I steered them towards Windows. And I'm curious bout whether I should do it again next time they replace their hardware.

 

[leet]

So is this because it is written in C# and Microsoft has finally polished up their .NET Core, etc?

More likely it's because they now have six versions instead of two, so being as unified as possible is critical.

Traditional Windows, Modern Windows (is that still a thing?), Mac, iOS, Android, HTML5/ChromeOS.

What astounds me is that it took them 20 years. I never understood why MS Office for Mac didn't start with the Windows codebase to begin with. It should have been shared code from Day One.

Maybe because Microsoft office for Mac was created first. In the case of MS Word nearly 5 years before.

OK, so why didn't WinWord start with the Word for Mac codebase? It's clear that neither began from the Word for DOS codebase.

Presumably because there were enough differences between both the chips being targeted (Motorola vs. Intel) and the development environments (don’t remember what they would have been at the time) that it would have been impractical.

 

[rick*d]

So is this because it is written in C# and Microsoft has finally polished up their .NET Core, etc?

More likely it's because they now have six versions instead of two, so being as unified as possible is critical.

Traditional Windows, Modern Windows (is that still a thing?), Mac, iOS, Android, HTML5/ChromeOS.

What astounds me is that it took them 20 years. I never understood why MS Office for Mac didn't start with the Windows codebase to begin with. It should have been shared code from Day One.

Maybe because Microsoft office for Mac was created first. In the case of MS Word nearly 5 years before.

OK, so why didn't WinWord start with the Word for Mac codebase? It's clear that neither began from the Word for DOS codebase.

Presumably because there were enough differences between both the chips being targeted (Motorola vs. Intel) and the development environments (don’t remember what they would have been at the time) that it would have been impractical.

For twenty years?

 

[glnz]

If we already put one of our 5 uses of O365 Home on our iMac, is this update happening on its own?
If not, how do we push it manually?

 

[leet]

For twenty years?

Well you specifically asked why they didn't start with a unified code base. Once they had two code bases they tried to unify them with Word 6 (I don't think there were unified versions of apps corresponding to Office yet, but don't care enough to check.) It was a port of the Windows app on the Mac, and it sucked balls (on the Mac).

 

[rick*d]

For twenty years?

Well you specifically asked why they didn't start with a unified code base. Once they had two code bases they tried to unify them with Word 6 (I don't think there were unified versions of apps corresponding to Office yet, but don't care enough to check.) It was a port of the Windows app on the Mac, and it sucked balls (on the Mac).

OK, good point. I did sort of change the subject there. My bad.

 

[leet]

For twenty years?

Well you specifically asked why they didn't start with a unified code base. Once they had two code bases they tried to unify them with Word 6 (I don't think there were unified versions of apps corresponding to Office yet, but don't care enough to check.) It was a port of the Windows app on the Mac, and it sucked balls (on the Mac).

OK, good point. I did sort of change the subject there. My bad.

No worries. It's kinda fun reminiscing about some of the stuff we had to put up with in the good ol' days.

 

[caution live frogs]

Office for Mac was awful compared to Windows. Every second feature I'd go to use was missing, and many features were only half-implemented.

As a Mac user who is forced to deal with Windows for work, I have to say there are some Mac-specific Office behaviors/features that I wish would go the other direction.

Shortcuts for "save as" for example - why is there no keyboard shortcut for this in Office365 on Windows? Ctrl-Shift-S does nothing useful. Cmd-Shift-S opens the Save As dialog.

Nonprinting characters - I leave them turned on when proofing. On Mac they show as light blue (making them visible but easy to ignore); on Windows they are whatever color the text happens to be (which is maddening!)

Find/replace dialog is more user-friendly in Word16 for Mac than it is on Windows. Pulling up detailed style info seems easier. Etc, etc, etc... I seriously hope they take the best ideas from each platform rather than reducing to the lowest common denominator across all.

 

[Ogre_]

Oh, so Visio for Mac OS is out?

I really want Visio for the iPad, so that i can actually do diagrams while walking around a campus... rather than scrawl handwritten notes to then re-do in visio later.

Yes, Windows tablets exist. They're garbage.

I have a Dell Latitude 7350 tablet running Windows 10 and it's not garbage. I'm using it now.
Do you consider the Surface Pro garbage, too? You do know the tablet market is all over the map, right? Some are great, some are garbage. If you pay iPad prices you're hard pressed to find garbage from any manufacturer.

"iPad prices" go from $329 to $1,200. You are going to have to be more specific than that. Most Windows laptops or tablets in the $300 price range are plastic crap with tons of bloatware and quality goes up with price.

I don't see a lot of Windows machines sold as stand-alone tablets regardless. The vast majority are purchased with a keyboard and are only infrequently detached from that keyboard. They are laptops with tablet aspirations.

 

[woodelf]

Oh, wow, now there's a horrible set of memories from the 90s. Combine Word 6 with a Powerbook 5300 that crashed several times per hour and took several minutes to reboot, one hundred and twenty arts students who'd never before used a computer, and dodgy projection systems in three different lecture theatres, and you've managed to simulate a little part of the hell that was my 1996.

Shudder...

Word 5.1a for Mac--the last version of MSWord I didn't hate. Still preferred several of its competitors, but it was at least a really solid word processor.

 

[co-lee]

What does Microsoft Office have that cannot be replaced by Libreoffice and Google Docs?

Just answering wrt to gdocs,
from my current pov: nothing. gdocs is just better.
from previous povs: a lot.

ms office does a much better job of controlling print layout than gdocs does. So, if that matters, this is a real difference. (This doesn't matter to me these days.)

powerpoint is way more capable than gslides. So, in a previous life when powerpoint was sometimes my development platform , it really mattered. Now, I don't care about all those little ppt features and gslides is fast and easy to use. So, I use it for lecture slides and notes.

excel does a bunch of stuff in excel that gsheets doesn't. And the doc for gsheets is basically "go look at the excel doc and figure that most of it will work here". But, gsheets isn't really a spreadsheet: it's a spreadsheet front end to a database. And so, my experience is that I can handle much larger data sets in gsheets than I could in good ol excel. I routinely query big spreadsheets in ways that would have brought my laptop to its knees when I was using excel.

The gdocs extension environment is built on javascript, windows office is vba. Depending on who you are, this may be a big deal. I'd way rather write custom code in javascript than vb, so I'm much happier with the gdocs approach.

So, it depends. If all you're doing is typing at a screen and making some straightforward calculations in a spreadsheet, there's no real difference. Once you go beyond that, your niche requirements may push you one way or the other. I'm personally happy to have cut another cord tieing me to the MS mothership ...