From the official Microsoft blog:
We have released the first drop of a fully 64-bit version of Office 2016 for Mac to the Insider Fast channel! The update number is 15.25 (160630). I do encourage Insider Fast users to install this update and give it a test. We want to know about any problems you encounter as soon as possible, so that we can make sure we address them before the official release.
My original take on this was amazement that a 64-bit Office was just now emerging in beta. After all, the ability to produce 64-bit apps has been around since OS X 10.4 Tiger, which shipped in 2005.
But this Office team has had to overcome some significant hurdles to bring this new product to life. So many hurdles, that it might be more appropriate to be amazed that they were able to accomplish what turned out to be a Herculean task.
For starters, since Tiger, Microsoft Office for Mac has had a series of major product releases: Office 2004, Office 2008, Office 2011, not to mention updates and side releases (like Outlook). All that work was done while making the transition from CodeWarrior to Xcode, PPC to Intel, gcc to clang, moving from Carbon to Cocoa, not to mention dealing with the emergence of a brand spanking new platform in iOS.
Props to the Office for Mac team for their dedication in bringing this new version to life. And note to self: Don’t be so amazed that something so difficult took so long. The best things do.
I would guess that the main reason is that there just isn’t enough developers and testers to take on the amount of work they are doing.
This, of course, is just little ol’ me guessing.
On the Win side, 64 bit office is a disaster because of extensions such as Acrobat, etc. NO ONE uses it.
Yeah, all the versions of Office 2016 seem to share a common code base, and thus is probably a complete break from Office 2011. Just making sure it worked first is probably a greater priority.
Let me tell you, it’s the Seattle way to do a lot of talking and not a lot of working. Every company here is so far behind and it takes them FOREVER to get anything done because companies are full of ‘managers’ and ‘executives’ who do nothing but have meetings instead of getting shit done.
Congratulations to all of you who’ve been waiting for 64-bit Office so you could get some “real” work done.
I do. 😉
Yeah, I think they’ve spent a ton of time consolidating all the code across platforms. c++ maybe? Just to ensure that rendering on any and all platforms they support is exactly the same.
Another reason would be maintainability. So much better to have one code base to work from for everything.
The complexity of going to a common code base would be mind numbing. Back in 2006 Office Mac had 30 million lines of code, mostly C++. There is a tremendous amount of code shared across different products (e.g. Word & Powerpoint) plus core algorithms are written pretty close to the metal (e.g. Excel recalculation).
I wonder how much code they actually can share across OS+Chip lines?
Many, many, many people do.
Microsoft has advised us at my University (large) that they recommend x86 version. Also confirmed instability and problems based on my first hand experience deploying. Also, little benefit to having x64 in a Word processor, etc. If MS is going to invest effort into Office for Mac, why wouldn’t they fix what we already have? HUGE memory footprint and sluggish performance, for example.
32bit Office 2010 FTW! Except when it crashes – typically due to a semi compatible extension…
I can see why a tiny little outfit like Microsoft might have trouble with this. Did they ever move out of that office in Albuquerque?
None of what you’ve written explains why they compiled the new Office 2016 for 32-bit, rather than 64-bit.
I misread what Ezra was saying or Exra misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying that no one uses the Acrobat extensions in Word.
As far as the sluggishness and huge memory footprint, I too have stayed on the x86 version.
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I’m more concerned with all of the features that were in Office 2011 that are missing from Office 2016 than I am about the conversion to 64-bit. I wish they would spend their development resources bringing the 2016 version to feature parity with the 2011 version. It is completely frustrating.