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Comment by krembo | Hacker News Reader

Office was available for Mac for many years. The news here is that Office is now in the Mac App Store, not that big of a news. Anyhow, worth noting that the Mac versions of Office are no near to the Windows versions. They are thin clients with only a portion of the win capabilities, and those which exists are buggy, to say the least.

If I had a Mac, I would go to G Suite, which gives better capabilities for 99.9% of the users, and if I was on the .1% I would go and buy a PC.

* BTW- Wine 4 was released this week, and they also don't support any of the O365 apps, especially not their 64bit versions.

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> The news here is that Office is now in the Mac App Store, not that big of a news.

It is bigger news than you might think. The Mac App Store has resoundingly failed to attract most "premium" Mac apps. Skype? No. Spotify? No. Chrome? No. Photoshop? No. VMware? No. Steam? No. Minecraft? No. Dropbox? No. Sketch? Left.

The redesigned App Store app was the first signal in years that Apple was starting to take it seriously again, and now they've brought one of the most popular pieces of software to the store. That's a big move.

Not only has office been available on the Mac for many years, it started on the Mac.

If you're so vested into microsoft's products you should stay on windows. There's always going to be that one thing you can't do for people like you, so why bother? For the rest of the world, office for mac has been amazing, and works perfectly. The people who I got on mac (around 4, I believe) are pretty heavy Office users, and they haven't complained once. They have, however, actually said to me that they're shocked by the difference between what they're told about mac and how it actually is, and they quite literally thanked me that I showed them mac. Office for mac is perfect for 99.9% of users. You can always bootcamp, but like I said, if you really need to use all those obscure features you know from windows, then yeah, stay on windows.

Not sure what you're talking about. I've been using Office on OSX since it's been a thing and it's always been pretty much equivalent. Especially recently.

see my reply below to tphan :-)

It's not a thin client though...

I use both Office for Mac and Windows all the time and Office for Mac is pretty reliable IMO. They pretty much have feature parity. Which features are you missing?

Have you tried using PowerQuery for instance? It's only one of the things available in Windows only. Same if you try to work with the Data Model. (I'm not sure for Macros & VBAs but can guess they are also mostly not functional) Again, not very common for the 99%, but if you are an Excel power user you should know about those, especially about PQ.

Is MS Access still missing?

Yes, I believe there are no plans to get Access to work on macOS.

I believe that is a good thing. I used to work at Microsoft and many of their own employees hate Access and wish Microsoft would have replaced it with Foxpro when they bought that back in the 90s.

Upon reading your comment I was curious why it was so downvoted. So many reasons.. for me it was the bit about Office on Mac being a “thin client”. Dude. No.

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