This comparison of the differences between Microsoft Office on Mac, Windows, and iOS devices was put together by Kurt Schmucker who (disclaimer) works for Parallels — the company that makes slick virtual machine apps for running Windows and other operating systems on Mac — but he also happens to know a thing or two about the subject after his previous role as Senior Mac Evangelist at Microsoft and on the Office team. So what exactly is missing on Mac and iOS devices compared to Windows when it comes to the Office suite?
In the charts below, Schmucker breaks down feature-by-feature exactly what you get (and don’t get) in each of the different versions of the productivity suite including Office 2016 and 2013 for Windows, Office 2016 and 2011 for Mac, and Office for iPad.
The full charts (below) show suite-wide differences between the versions such as missing apps, lack of support for Visual Basic and ActiveX, right-to-left language support, accessibility features, AppleScript and much more. Other charts in the study show feature variations for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, with the majority of the features listed unavailable for iPad users and a mixed bag for the other versions.
And Schmucker points out two things regarding the iPad specifically. One positive is support for right-to-left languages, which he notes is something that Mac users have bene asking for but have yet to receive, while a negative for the iPad is lack of multiple selection support in PowerPoint, something Schmucker notes is a pretty basic but crucial function for the app.
In the end, he concludes that a mix of the various Office suites is the best approach but admits that his main, go-to version is MacOffice 2011 (apart from using the latest version of Outlook due to enhanced performance):
“I worked for the MacOffice team at Microsoft for several years, and at that time I also worked closely with colleagues on the WinOffice teams. Because of this background, I am often able to pick just the right Office app that will make a given task the easiest to do. One task might be particularly well suited to MacWord 2011 because Publishing Layout View— a feature only in that one Word version— will make this task easy. Another task might be suited to WinPPT because of the Animation Painter, which is not in any MacPPT version. Yet another task might be best suited to WInPPT 2013 because it needs an Office extension not available in other Office suites.”
And this is what Schmucker’s setup looks like with various versions of Office installed on Mac and using virtual machines:
- MacOffice 2011 is my main productivity suite and is installed on my El Capitan MacBook Pro. MacOutlook 2016 came out long before the entire MacOffice 2016 suite, and because of the vastly improved performance of MacOutlook 2016, I use it as my main email client, instead of MacOutlook 2011.
- WinOffice 2013 is installed in a Windows 7 virtual machine (VM) (under Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition) on my MacBook Pro.
- iPad Office is installed on my iPad. As you saw in the tables above, iPad Office is lacking many of the features of WinOffice and MacOffice, so I also have Parallels Access on my iPad which lets me access and run the full featured versions of any Office suite (or any other application) on my computers and use them with natural iPad gestures. (You can download a free trial of Parallels Access for iOS and Android to access your Mac and/or PC at www.parallels.com/access).w
- MacOffice 2016 is installed in an El Capitan VM (under Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition) on my MacBook Pro.
- WinOffice 2016 is installed in a Windows 10 VM (under Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition) on my MacBook Pro.
Click the charts below to view them in full size:
If accessing Windows-only or version specific features on your Mac is the goal, Schmucker notes that with Parallels you can easily run different versions of Windows and Office on one Mac using Parallels Desktop for Mac and a subscription to Office 365 Home (which will give you five installs of the Office suites of your choice). That’s how he accomplished the setup above using various virtual machine installs.
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What’s the difference between “missing” and “unavailable”?
One is missing and the other is er… unavailable! hehe ;)
While I understand that Schmucker has a bias toward pushing Windows, these charts show just how neglected OS X and iOS have been regarding Office. Macs and new iPads are perfectly capable of running versions that come closer to feature parity (particularly OS X, which doesn’t have iOS’ sandboxing limitations).
Still waiting for compatibility between WinOutlook and MacOutlook. It is improving but is not there yet. Case in point, the address cards view in WinOutlook is nowhere to be found in MacOutlook. Also, on WinOutlook, you can address directly an alternate email account linked in Exchange but you cannot in MacOutlook.
Just use Apple’s Apps, much better.
I want to add that, while it may work for you, I’ve hated Outlook since Office98. Forced to use Office 2011 Outlook at work and a week doesn’t pass when I don’t trip over another annoyance. Just last week my profile corrupted, again, and I lost my rules and accumulated addresses. That has never happened with Mail.app.
IMHO Microsoft has stepped up support for non-Microsoft OS’s (especially iOS) but still does not “get it” that Macs are in the enterprise, at home, and are here to stay. They still feel they can push Windows only to enterprises and businesses. Take OneDrive for Business – try share a folder or file with a colleague running a Mac? Good luck. Sync Sharepoint (shudder) offline? Never… yet they push the tool as though its good enough. At our Fortune 500 company if a product can’t support OS X, iOS and even Android its not likely to become a standard. I can only hope more and more are pushing back so they get the message. I don’t think its a technical issue as much as it is a directive to keep their applications in feature parity.
Id view the images if your image viewer wasn’t so shitty
As formerly part of the Microsoft Office team he is at least partly guilty of shafting us Mac users with the crippleware that Microsoft foist on us.
By the way, additional missing feature – Outlook 2011 and 2016 for Mac cannot export PST files and have extremely poor support for opening PST files, they can only import the entire PST and don’t let you open and access individual emails. I have not bothered mentioning no MAPI or ActiveSync support in Outlook for Mac as while they are missing they are not critical.
iWork needs the renovation
Don’t forget the complete lack of statistical charting tools in Office 2016 MAC. I want to rip my hair out when I design a box plot in windows and no one on a Mac can create one or even VIEW the damn thing!!!
With all these options available, I find WinOffice 2013 to be the best option. WinOutlook 2016 has problems connecting to Exchange 2010, and WinWord 2016 caused a major headache when it failed to adopt the WinWord 2013 Building Blocks and kept on crashing. That user reverted to 2013, and I would advise anyone to stick with that unless they have a specific feature of 2016 which they need (I find that scenario somewhat unlikely though).
I personally use WinOffice 2016 and get round the Exchange 2010 problem with one email account by using MacOffice 2016 for that. There is no other reason for me to use any other MacOffice 2016 features when WinOffice 2013/2016 is better all round.
I have really really tried to use OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint, but it has too many sync failures to be considered trustworthy, and the latter doesn’t work with Mac at all. Plus file versioning only works for Office files, so just when you need it, you discover you don’t have a backup.
Don’t even get me started on Office 365… I have Business Premium, but I don’t even keep the apps on my iPad or iPhone because I don’t use them, and I can view files much more efficiently and on a greater variation of cloud solutions using PDF Expert. I’ve recently had users unable to use Office because MS required an “upgrade” from one plan to another, and they had to uninstall Office and reinstall a different version with fewer features, which the users were unable to do. Having asked MS: “Will any users have any loss of service?” The answer was no, and lo and behold I have users who lost their service.
I have similar attitudes to Windows 7 and 10. I use Windows 10, but have not found any reason that it is tangibly better than 7. Therefore I would always advise people stick to Windows 7 and Office 2013. MacOffice is fine if you don’t have demanding requirements. But I rely on Parallels; otherwise I’d be on a PC.
Totally agree on Office365. A couple of years ago we tried it at work as an option for our sales staff who are on the road. Failed in every way. A couple of months of corrupted documents, lost documents, failure to synch, failure to even launch due to network errors, and we abandoned the project.
One benefit of MacOutlook 2016 is that it opened a corrupt PST that even scanpst.exe was unable to fix, and I was able to recover it by loading the messages into Exchange from the Mac, then downloading into a fresh pst on the PC.
Why does ActiveX matter? Is that even a thing anymore?
I’m keeping this guide handy for when I land that plum position at Evil Corp.
You know, this is really only pertinent if you’re married to Microsoft (which, it seems, Mr. Schmucker is still having separation anxiety). If instead, your business is looking for the best solution for word processing, numeric calculations, presentations, document publishing, database management, and drawing, then you’ll be looking beyond just Microsoft and be more interested in interoperability and functionality than mandating “Office ####”.
Basing your business on a single product suite from a specific vendor is such a throwback to last century; this guy deserves every laugh and guffaw coming to him for citing critical technical needs like “Visual Basic” and “ActiveX”.
Project and Visio not being available for Mac is a big complaint of mine. I know there are alternatives but they are quite expensive and they consistently have negative reviews from users who have experienced compatibility issues. The thing is that I could really use both from time to time and I’d prefer a native solution over a VM or RDP session to run them.
Lucidchart is fully compatible with Viso and is much cheaper.
It’s bad when 2015 Word can’t properly work with my 2011 .pub files.
A few more differences that are not in the charts.
1. MacOffice 2016 has no quick access toolbar. I understand WinOffice has it and MacOffice 2011 had it. For some reason, MS decided Mac users didn’t need it anymore. The UserVoice page (https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304942-word-for-mac) indicates that as of Nov 2015, the Mac Word team is working on this and it is due “soon”. And for Excel, (https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304933-excel-for-mac), that team indicate in October they were working on this, but no indication yet of timing.
2. I’ve read chatter that suggests WinOffice has customisable ribbons. I can only wish.
3. MacOffice 2016 is 32 bit only and will only use a single core. Apparently WinOffice is 64 bit and does use multi cores. WinExcel will leave MacExcel in its dust.
4. iPad Excel does not run user defined functions. iPad Word does not handle cross references (but it does display existing ones). There are likely many more things iPad Office does not do, but for me, those two rendered it a non-starter, so I have not even tried to figure out what else is non-functional with iPad Office.
I wonder, how big is the MacOffice development team and how big is the WinOffice development team? Is there any chance that MacOffice will ever be able to catch up to WinOffice? Or are we doomed to second class treatment for the foreseeable future?
Mac is ≈ 200. No idea how many on the Windows team.
Right to left text, like for Arabic, is supported in Word 2016 for Mac, but not powerpoint.
Let’s face it. Office is not a great suit at all. iWork is much better.
Seriously? Probably someone still has not updated the iWork 09 version…
It’s what I use on my own systems, but then I’m a writer. I don’t need 75% of the obscure features that Office has, legal footnotes, and such. I just write pages of text, dialogue, and such. For that it’s great. I can understand that if you NEED the features in MSOffice you have to use MSOffice. I just find that many people and businesses assume they need MSOffice when in fact other options would work just as well for less. At my work we are a MSOffice shop. I quietly installed OpenOffice (I hate the ribbon that much), and have been using it for nearly five years now. It exports into .doc and .xls format and nobody has noticed.
Nobody needs 80% of the functionality of Word. The problem is that everyone needs a different 80%. It’s fantastic that you have solved your own problem for documents but the reality is that your organisation has to have a solution that delivers for 100% of it’s staff (regardless of personal preferences – I remember people who were using their WordPerfect keyboard shortcuts compatabaility in Word a decade after the product was gone). That means MS Office.
In any case, the killer feature of office is Excel. That simply cannot be easily substituted!
Aren’t you missing one of the critical elements that isn’t included in Excel for either Mac Office 2011 or 2016 — the inability to use more than one processor core? This is a real issue for many businesses, and should be included in articles like this one. Reference – https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/3qzfh1/excel_2016_for_macusing_only_1_processor/
Sucks that Mac 2016 is missing Visual Basic, but still this latest release is by far Microsoft’s best effort
I recently found out that there is a BIG difference between the Excel versions. Evidently in the Windows version, Excel automatically saves prior versions of the document. There is no such automatic option in the Mac version.
Yes, there is an autosave feature in the Mac version. You turn it on in Excel Preference\Save menu. The default is every 10 minutes.
I don’t use MacOffice for my personal use. Apple Apps do all I need for now in a very simple way.
Grammar check is missing too!
Pathetic as it may sound, I would like MS to address the simplest of issues, adding an image to the header or footer of an Excel 2016 for Mac sheet.
They pretend that “adding that feature” is an idea that needs to be voted up???? Really? Admit it, you screwed up the coding and missed to add this standard option.
Please help us shake them up!
https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304933-excel-for-mac/suggestions/9303810-enable-pictures-or-photos-to-be-inserted-into-the?tracking_code=250d2f72f71d944c7961da60e0b58ae7
Thanks for the overview. But maybe it could be updated? At least “Smart lookup” and right to left support have been added in one of the monthly updates.
I’m a teacher and use Word for Mac to create worksheets for my class. I don’t really use the other components in Office Suite. So, I opened a document tonight and was informed that Word for Mac 2011 would no longer allow me to save changes and that I had to upgrade to 2016. I did a little research online, considered librefree and eventually bought the stand alone Suite for $150. After installing the new suite, I looked for it in the applications folder and saw the 2011 Suite. I opened Word 2011 and lo and behold, it still worked, still allowed me to save changes to my documents. I feel like I was tricked by MS, which doesn’t surprise me. I just want to spread the word that if you’re like me, happy with Word 2011, YOU DO NOT NEED TO PURCHASE Word 2016 just yet.