[infecto]

Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS.

Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.

[prmoustache]

Many companies nowadays only provide the most basic office license with only web access to office apps for most of their employees. So for those that puts all OS at the same level.

Having said that software lagging in versions/features doesn't mean users are less efficient using the older tool. Are todays office users more efficient in word and excel with the ribbon than they were using office97 a few decades ago? Has it been measured? I know I am still lost whenever I need to find something on the ribbon.

[infecto]

Sure if you are a basic user it’s no issue. Basic being someone using 1% of the feature set. The moment you start developing any skills in office there is an actual difference in the product. Like I already said, MacOS did not have ribbon shortcuts until a few months ago. That’s simply insulting that such a core function for users would be missing.

[prmoustache]

The ribbon is a UI providing a way to access functions, not a core function in itself.

[infecto]

Are we arguing if ribbon shortcuts are not a core function?? I don’t know why we are even going down this road but… for any user that has moderate level of use in excel, the keyboard shortcuts are used so heavily that they absolutely become a core function to the use of the platform. Power users in finance may even go to the extreme of popping out certain key caps on their keyboard to reduce mistakes and maximize their efficiency.

[bdamm]

How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well.

My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.

[mountain_peak]

People might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess.

Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.

My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.

[storus]

They still aren't on-par today, in MacOS Excel you can't do some charts you can do on Windows.

[pseudosavant]

I can't speak for Teams (that is just an Electron app), but all of the legacy Mac Office apps are still a subset of the capabilities of their Windows counterparts.

If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.

[havaloc]

What's sad is that in my experience supporting 80 users, Word et al work with fewer issues on Mac. The stack integration on Windows is fine, until it isn't.

[infecto]

Lack of parity. It’s getting better but my classic example is ribbon shortcuts for Excel. They did not exist until something like 6 months ago.

[ramgine]

Anecdotal but I’m a sysadmin in the IT dept in my rather larger company and have zero issues with office on my daily driver m2 Mac Pro. On my Dell precision running win 11 I constantly have issues with outlook, teams, etc.

[infecto]

Cannot speak to bugs but purely functionality. Historically speaking the macOS products lag by years.

[a1o]

I don’t know why you are getting downvoted, agree with you, Microsoft Office is awful on macOS, it just doesn’t work the same, has awful integration with Sharepoint (and Sharepoint in MS Teams and OneDrive), and continuously forgets its properly licensed and complains with a big message that it isn’t licensed - sometimes downgrading to read only. It’s just a terrible thing to use.