#Best office suite for mac os x windows 10#

Some of these differences are support for older Exchange versions, voting buttons, Visual Basic support, conversation clean up, and many, many more, but see this blog post for a much longer, but non-exhaustive list.ĭespite an immense amount of excellent work by the MacExcel team in recent years, there are still some WinExcel features that are not supported in MacExcel. There are more feature differences between WinOutlook and MacOutlook than there are between any other pairs of apps in the two suites. See this blog post (and others in the near future) for all the details and lots more examples.

#Best office suite for mac os x windows 10#

There is no stylus or touch screen on the Mac, so naturally Microsoft has not brought Ink to MacOffice.īut, if there is no stylus or touch screen on the Mac, how does WinOffice in a virtual machine provide any differences? Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac, when running WinOffice 2016 in a Windows 10 virtual machine does give the user the capability to use Ink on the Mac. Ink is the ability to annotate or add content to an Office document with a stylus or finger on a touch screen in an extraordinarily natural way. The latest important addition to Office, however, is only in WinOffice, and that is Ink. There have been several truly important additions to Office in the last five or six years - Office Open XML-based document file formats, the Ribbon, and SmartArt, to name a few - and these have appeared in both WinOffice and MacOffice. What does a Mac user lose if they pick MacOffice over WinOffice to use on their Mac? There are a bunch, and here is a list, which I have divided into major and minor differences: So, what about feature differences, since as stated above Win Office > Mac Office. Usability differences between these two suites have gone by the wayside in the 2016 suites, with MacOffice largely adopting the WinOffice user interface (UI), and losing most of its unique Mac UI advantages that made it so distinctive in past years. Perhaps, with a stopwatch and a really quick trigger finger you could measure some sub-second differences, but you would never notice these differences in actual use. Macs today have an over-abundance of processing power and Parallels Desktop for Mac runs so efficiently that there is no perceptible performance difference between Office for Mac running natively and Office for Windows running in a virtual machine. Which one to choose? Any performance or usability differences? What about feature differences?įirst, let’s dispel any talk of performance differences. But a Mac user can choose to run Office for Mac natively or Office for Windows in Parallels Desktop in a Windows virtual machine. Similarly, an iPad user can only choose iPad Office. (And that doesn’t mean I have given Microsoft a boatload of cash - I got all three suites as part of my $100/year Office 365 subscription - a bargain at twice the price, IMHO.)Ī Windows user has only one choice: Office for Windows. ) Win Office > Mac Office > iPad Officeĭon’t get me wrong – I have all three suites, and I use and like them all, but that doesn’t mean I am blind to their differences. And, like them or hate them, no one can ever call the Office apps “‘trivial”.Ĭomparing the feature set of these three suites, I think everyone can agree that Office for Windows is on top, Office for iPad is at the bottom, with Office for Mac squarely in the middle. The Microsoft Office suites: Office for Windows, Office for Mac, and Office for iPad provide the greatest level of compatibility between any disparate suites, but there can never be complete compatibility between different apps, except for the most trivial of apps.