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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Desktop Office. Microsoft has been offering a "real office" on Mac for many, many years now. The news is not that Office is on Mac, it's that it is distributed through the App Store.

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There were even Mac versions of Word and Excel years before either of them were available for Windows.

A saw a woman from Microsoft’s MAC Business Unit give a presentation where she stated that most new Office features appear in the Mac version first as a test bed before they’re rolled out to Athens Windows side.

I knew they've had full Office since forever. I just didn't know if the App Store version itself was full Office or a mobile/web Office like on the iOS App Store.

According to this post [0], Microsoft use a "shared Office codebase for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android". Before the individual iOS Office apps, Microsoft had an "Office mobile" app which may well have been a web app (though I can't find anything on that either way).

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

I believe it was indeed a web app. The efforts to get a shared code base began in earnest after Nadella took over as CEO at MS, and Office stopped being a means to sell copies of Windows and rather a chargeable service unto itself - I believe the shared codebase first started to surface in the apps for iOS and Android.

Well, I say that. Really, the Windows and macOS version had been sharing code for ages, but plenty of it was still bespoke for macOS. I think their rewrite to Cocoa, which I believe happened around the same time as the iOS apps started being developed, helped to bring further parity.

> According to this post [0], Microsoft use a "shared Office codebase for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android".

At very least, from my experience, I believe the iOS, Mac and Windows do share the same underlying engine. The web version looks like a reimplementation that reimplements all its weird quirks… but there're still minor difference here and there.

I have to deal with few Japanese documentation which uses a relatively obscure feature exposed only to Japanese version of Office (e.g. I think it present in all versions now as "Enclosed Character") and so far every Word implementation fail to render that in the way it's expected to be rendered, but it renders consistently in all versions of Microsoft Office {Windows, iOS, Mac}.

I wouldn't say "full office". I use Office on Mac and it's clearly not as configurable or polished as Windows :(

It's recent that it's the "same" Office though, no? It used to have different codebase (with, I'm sure, some reused code) and even had different release versions (ie: Office 2011 on Mac VS Office 2010/2013 on Windows)

I dug a bit and I found this article[1] that says it's now using a common codebase for Office 2016 since January last year, so I guess it's not something new with this new release of Office 365 on mac.

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-aligns-its-different...

The quality on Mac is nowhere near the quality of Office on Windows. At least Excel. Slow, crashes, tons of missing shortcuts, etc.

FWIW, they have added a lot of missing shortcuts in the last few years. Haven't used Windows Excel in ages, though, so I'm not sure what's still missing. That being said, Excel for Mac has gotten slower in a recent update. And the UI text, which already kinda looked crummy and not very Mac-like, now looks even less Mac-like.

But Excel is the lingua franca of business, so I keep on using it.

Re: the text; I think they're going for a consistent visual design language with the iOS apps - for better or worse.

I haven’t researched recently, but Excel used to run on a single core on the Mac. So any decent sized file would cause tremendous issues. I used to run Windows via Parallels just to use the Windows version of Excel.

Edit: it looks like multi threads were introduced in January 2018 [0].

[0] https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304933-excel-for-mac/sugg...

They’ve been going back and forth between using the same codebase and separate codebases since the 90s.

Can I get a source on that? Looks like they haven't had a shared codebase in almost 20 years.

I did say since the 90s and Word 6 was the last version they released until Word ‘98

http://lowendmac.com/2013/microsoft-word-for-mac-faq/

Word 6.0, launched in 1993, is widely considered to be the worst version of Word ever for the Mac, as it was based on the same codebase as Word 6.0 for Windows. That meant that it looked and worked more like Windows software than a Macintosh program. Mac users were so up in arms that Microsoft actually released a Word 5.1 downgrade to unhappy Word 6.0 owners.

It was five years before Microsoft unleashed another version of Word for the Mac,

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