Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kevindqc 2695 days ago
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...
2 comments
erichurkman 2695 days ago
The quality on Mac is nowhere near the quality of Office on Windows. At least Excel. Slow, crashes, tons of missing shortcuts, etc.
link
toasterlovin 2695 days ago
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.

link
zapzupnz 2695 days ago
Re: the text; I think they're going for a consistent visual design language with the iOS apps - for better or worse.
link
sturgill 2695 days ago
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...

link
scarface74 2695 days ago
They’ve been going back and forth between using the same codebase and separate codebases since the 90s.
link
CephalopodMD 2695 days ago
Can I get a source on that? Looks like they haven't had a shared codebase in almost 20 years.
link
scarface74 2695 days ago
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,

link