If you’ve used Microsoft Office on an M1 Mac, it gets better – Microsoft today announced an update that provides native support for Apple’s new custom chip architecture for the Windows productivity suite. The apps that get the updates are Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Notably absent is Teams.
The updates make the apps universal – meaning that these versions can run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, so any upcoming updates or features will come at the same time for both platforms.
If you use Teams a lot, you may be disappointed to learn that it isn’t included in today’s rollout of updates. Microsoft promises to be working on that platform in their blog post, but the company has not announced a timeline. Meanwhile, Slack, Microsoft’s main competitor in communications, has native support in a public beta. It seems like you should be using the emulated version for now if your team is using Teams.
Office users who have turned on automatic updates should have the new versions sometime today, and anyone can update them through the Mac App Store or Microsoft’s AutoUpdate software (depending on whether you downloaded Office from the App Store or directly from Microsoft). In addition to native Apple Silicon support, Outlook users get support for iCloud accounts, allowing them to sync their email, contacts and calendars with the app if they use Apple’s service to store them.