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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

> Office was once tied largely to Windows PCs, but the company today is working to make sure its flagship productivity suite works anywhere its users are – even on competitors’ OS’s.

Huh? Office has been on the Macintosh for decades. This isn't really new.

Heck, Office was on the Mac before it was on Windows.

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Office for the Mac was hamstrung in a way that made it usable for home users, but difficult for businesses. There was no Outlook, no Visual Basic, and IIRC: No pivot tables in Excel, no OOXML until 2011 (4 years after Office for Windows), less integration with Microsoft's backend servers (Sharepoint, etc.), and some other missing features. I'm also thinking that Group Policy management didn't work or not as well.

Much of that was later fixed, but for a long time it was another powerful reason for businesses to use Windows.

As a home user of Office on Mac (and therefore didn't bother with these things), I have to ask: What has been fixed, and what hasn't?

Try the Office 2016 Beta for OSX. Its going to be a launch day first class citizen of the Office family, and is a complete UI/UX rewrite to match what Windows does now.

I'm using it, it's ahead of the non-Beta Office that Office 365 currently ships for Windows.

Any word on when that's gonna launch?

My mac users are freaking out because we just switched from gApps to Exchange (I know, don't even) and Outlook 2011 is a joke compared to what my windows peeps are getting. (not to mention the fact that I have to create a second set of instructions just for them)

> we just switched from gApps to Exchange (I know, don't even)

I don't know: Why not switch from Google Apps to Exchange?

Office365 and Office365 for Business's OSX installer already ships the new Outlook by default, Excel and Word and the rest are available as optional downloads, and will ship in the main installer, from what I've heard, early next year.

Compared against Windows' current version of Office, it is a refinement. Compared against Office 2011 for Mac, it is a massive upgrade, like day and night.

We're part of a university and are bound by their license agreements which until July 1st are just for Office 2013 and Office 2011, in a week from today that mercifully changes to Office 365 and a much tighter integration with onedrive for business support and larger mailboxes (until now it's been 8gb a piece) + an easier overall installation process.

With Outlook 2011 for Mac being little more than a rebranded Entourage, long recognized even by Microsoft as not equivalent to Outlook for Windows, it's no wonder your folks are having problems. I've pushed my Mac users to use Apple's Mail.app instead- much less friction than using a program that is Outlook in name only.

And Microsoft has been pushing their browser-based Office suite for several years now. I believe it officially support IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on all desktop platforms.

We've tried using it at work but found that it's really full of bugs on anything other than IE.

Office on the Mac was called Multiplan in 1984 [1]

Office 1.0 came out November 19, 1990 but Word itself was 1983 [2]

People still used the original VisiCalc in the DOS days. Visicalc itself was an Apple II program [3]

Lotus bought and killed it but botched the transition to Windows, leaving the door open for Excel (ably assisted by the Windows API team no doubt).

[1] http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=AT&p_...

[2] http://toastytech.com/guis/word115.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

> Office on the Mac was called Multiplan in 1984 [1]

No it wasn't: that's nonsense.

Microsoft wrote some DOS programs in the early 1980s, including Word and Multiplan. Multiplan was a spreadsheet, similar to VisiCalc. It was never Office 1.0.

VisiCalc appeared on the Apple II, Apple III, Tandy TRS-80 and Atari 800. After Lotus launched 1-2-3 and killed VisiCalc, it bought Software Arts and closed it. However, Software Arts was almost dead by then anyway (and Bob Frankston went to work for Lotus). http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/09/business/lotus-set-to-acqu...

Lotus certainly botched the transition to Windows, partly because it was still making tons of money from 1-2-3 for DOS, and partly because it was best buddies with IBM, and both of them hated Microsoft. That ended happily when IBM bought Lotus Development. (Well, happily for all the executives, not for poor blooming users....)

If I remember right, Excel was released first for Mac

Right, Apple was already a market when Microsoft started to grow. That's maybe how Bill Gates got to have a peek at the GUI effort and PARC source. They have a special relationship.

Apple was big, rich and famous, because of the Apple II. So little Microsoft became the Mac's biggest backer and biggest supplier of software, and Bill Gates was featured at the Mac launch.

Excel and the graphical version of Word were written for the Mac, and PowerPoint -- a Mac program -- was bought in to make the first Microsoft Office suite, which was launched on the Mac.

Gates also offered to help Apple license Mac OS widely to make it an industry standard.

Apple didn't see the point of selling $100 software when it could sell $2,500-$3,500 computers.

That world started to change after 1990, when Windows 3 began to take off.

Don't be mad. The author's first computer was probably an iPad.

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