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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

> Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products.

That's probably because unlike most Microsoft products, Office is cross-platform and has to support multiple operating systems, including MacOS, iOS, and Android.

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Isn't Office for Mac a completely diverged fork from an old Windows version of Office? I remember some blog posts from the understaffed Mac Office team stating that much several years ago. I don't know if they rebased it in the meantime. The posts read as if the big Office team was focused entirely on Windows and everything else was done by understaffed teams struggling to keep up.

Since 2014 not anymore.

The Office team did a couple of session at CppCon about how they refactored the code.

"CppCon 2014: Zaika Antoun "Microsoft w/ C++ to Deliver Office Across Different Platforms"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc

Earlier this year they put out a blog post that announced that their cross-platform versions share a common codebase for "core functionality".

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Share...

Does 'core functionality' include opening a UTF-8-encoded CSV file properly?

Not anymore. From what I’ve been told from an insider, the latest versions are derived from a common code base now, with platform specific bits separate for each platform.

The latest office for Mac looks quite a bit like the windows version now (for once) so it’s not too surprising.

Funny story, Excel was on the Mac before Windows.

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