Q&A: What do you think about Office:Mac 2011 being 32-bit?

Via email, I was asked:

What are your
thoughts about Office 2011 being 32 bit instead of 64 bit?

As we announced last week during WWDC, we're drinking the Cocoa and moving our world in that direction.  Moving to Cocoa is a huge undertaking.  Outlook:Mac is Cocoa, and new features in the rest of the applications are also being built in Cocoa.  Since we're not going to be all-Cocoa in Office:Mac 2011, that means that we're going to be in a 32-bit world. 

From a user experience
perspective, the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit isn't terribly
meaningful. I can't imagine what one could do to a Word document that
would benefit from running in 64-bit mode instead of 32-bit mode. That
said, there are cases where 64-bit is meaningful. For example, if you had an extremely large
Excel spreadsheet with millions of cells and lots of complex calculations,
there can be a benefit to 64-bit. You could also get there with a massive
PowerPoint presentation that mostly consists of high-resolution images, but it
would have to be on the order of thousands of those images. Moving to 64-bit is part of our future plans, and it's why we're
beginning the long transition from Carbon to Cocoa. We've got around 30
million lines of code across the suite, so that transition is anything but
trivial.

From a performance
perspective, while there are performance improvements that come with 64-bit, there's still improvements to be wrung out of our 32-bit suite. With
each update to Office 2008, I've seen reports from users that it launches and runs faster.
In Office 2011, we've continued that performance work. I can't talk
a lot about it just yet, so for now I'll just say that there are some
absolutely awesome improvements that we're putting in our users' hands for
Office 2011.

In my opinion, and I say
this as someone who has a technical background but hasn't gotten down into the
deepest innards of our code, one of the main benefits of moving to 64-bit is
about future-proofing. 32-bit is going the way of the dodo, the

Newton

, and Carbon itself. The future is 64-bit. Getting there is a big technical
undertaking, and it's something that we've started working on already. For most people, they'll never notice the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 14, 2010
  Just remember to tell that to the Visual Studio team who have been refusing to go x64 for a good while now.

• Anonymous
  June 23, 2010
  I cannot believe that you would post a such thing like x64 is something to do with cosmetics on Microsoft's developer's blog!   You had so many opportunities and guess who won the battle of the Mac office suites? Apple! They won exchange interop way before you, they got a native Office XML solution before you put a bandaid fix. You had the chance to go to the Intel Platform for now 4 years! You had almost that same amount of time to go to x64 too! Your division had options when the Intel Macs and the Core based chips came out, but what had happened was you guys were asleep at the switch! You want to post "user friendly" fluffy posts that has the appearance that you are working to fix decades old problems. Wheres Visio? Where's Access (should work perfect on an Intel platform)? Where's Outlook, Publisher, Project, OneNote and other platforms? That was another big mistake! Of these that I just mentioned, Outlook should be developed not just for Exchange but the email client just like how the Windows version has had for the last decade! I don't to pay for $500 office suite if I am paying it for cheap icandy. I been wanting 99% (forget 40%) complete feature parity and compatibility, and I still can't get that with any MSO since 5.0 (really dating myself!) Has Microsoft gone into the dark side of the IBM's ultra big company philosophy with the lack of forward thinking? I am tired of the excuses and the "later updates", "wait till later this year" and any other sentence that begins or ends with "later." It's been a long lasting cliche and the blogs of the Mac Office is nothing but time wasting for me. By the way: there is no other solution out there for my needs. OOo, iWork, and the other suites don't even cut it to what I need. I need a Windows like MS Office to be 99% compatible with my Mac. I need to get back to "work" on an inferior office suite, because I am wasting my time to the developers with their ideas open and their minds shut.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2010
  Enterprise Mac User (AKA "Grumpy") said, "I need a Windows like MS Office to be 99% compatible with my Mac." I think that was called "Microsoft Office 4.x for Mac" — see especially Mac Word 6.

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2010
  Nadyne, The main thing for me is compatibility with Office 2007 / 2010. I'm not fussed about 32 bit-ness as long as: VBA has to work. My day to day work uses VBA macros heavily, and I hate having to down convert to 2003 .doc format, RDP into a remote server, run the macro, bring it back and convert it back to Office 2008 docx format. That's just a HUGE waste of time for me, and one of the reasons I don't use Office:mac more heavily than I already do. It looks and acts like a Mac app, and not a Windows app. Mac Word 5.1 == good, Word 6.0 == compatible but a UI disaster and sluggish on the Macs of the day (I had a Duo 210 at the time). I don't mind Office 2007 on my wife's PC, but that UI is certainly not Mac like. I hope that the ribbon is brought across in as Mac like a fashion as you folks can manage.   Services menu - I use these from time to time (like Dictionary (Thesaurus) lookup and translation, and it's frustrating that the current Office apps don't have any active services ("No services apply"). This is almost certainly a function of the use of Carbon versus your current frameworks, so I am looking forward to Outlook which you state is a Carbon app.   My book (OWASP Guide, 330 pages with 30 odd chapters in a master document + sub docs) needs to work without re-engineering it. I would love to have  the old Frame features like single click re-style, re-index, etc that seems nearly impossible in the current version of Office without a lot of futzing around in the master/sub-documents. I'd really like to open my Outlook 2003 PST's from before I converted back to the Mac. I have a huge cache of old e-mail I'd like back. I'm glad Outlook is coming and with it, I really hope that PST compatibility is there. WIth MacOS X's completely transparent 32 / 64 bit operation, I doubt many folks would really notice the jump outside of Excel spreadsheet gurus. thanks, Andrew