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Overview of Office for Mac (for admins and IT Pros)

  • Article

Applies to: Microsoft 365 for Mac, Office Long Term Service Channel (LTSC) for Mac 2024, LTSC for Mac 2021

The following Office apps are available for devices running macOS:

  • Word
  • Excel
  • PowerPoint
  • Outlook
  • OneNote
  • OneDrive
  • Teams

The following sections are intended to provide information to help you plan your deployment of Office to Mac users in your organization.

For more information, see Deployment options for admins for Office for Mac.

System requirements

Office for Mac is supported on the three most recent versions of macOS. As new major versions of macOS are made generally available, Microsoft removes support for the oldest version and support the newest and previous two versions of macOS. For more information, see Upgrade macOS to continue receiving Microsoft 365 and Office for Mac updates.

For all the system requirements, refer to System requirements for Microsoft 365 and Office.

Chipset support

Office provides native support for both Apple silicon and Intel-based Mac devices. All installation and update packages are provided in Universal 2 format. For more information, see Microsoft 365, Office 2021, and Office 2019 support for Apple silicon.

Languages

All the supported languages in Office for Mac are included as part of the installer package (.pkg) file. There aren't separate installer package files for each language, which means that admins don't need to choose which language to deploy to users. Instead, the language used at app start is based on the preferred locale settings in macOS. Users can switch to a different language without having to reinstall Office.

Updates

Office for Mac is updated approximately once a month. These updates include, as needed, security updates and nonsecurity updates, such as updates that provide stability or performance improvements for Office. For those users with a Microsoft 365 plan, these updates can also include new or improved features. For more information, see Deploy updates for Office for Mac.

Features

For information about features in the various versions of Office for Mac, review the following resources. Keep in mind that Office LTSC for Mac 2024 and Office LTSC for Mac 2021 don't receive new features. If you want to get new Office features on an ongoing basis, you should consider upgrading to a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Office.

If you're looking for information to help your users get started with Office for Mac, review the resources on Office Help & Training.

Office for Mac features

To review the latest features in each monthly release, refer to What's new in Microsoft 365 or Release notes for Office for Mac.

Tip

For early access to new features, check out the Microsoft 365 Insider Program for Business.

Office LTSC for Mac 2024 features

For information about the new features in Office LTSC for Mac 2021, refer to the following articles:

Office LTSC for Mac 2021 features

For information about the new features in Office LTSC for Mac 2021, refer to the following articles:

Privacy controls

There are preference settings available that allow you to configure settings related to diagnostic data and connected experiences for Office on a Mac. For more information, see Use preferences to manage privacy controls for Office for Mac.

App bundles

The app bundle for each app, such as Word, includes all the resources needed to run the app. There aren't any shared resources among the apps. For example, the app bundles for Excel for Mac and Word for Mac both contain the font resources needed by the app.

Customizations

To help improve security, Office for Mac implemented Apple app sandboxing guidelines. This means that you can't customize the app bundle before or after you deploy Office. Don't add, change, or remove files in an app bundle. For example, even if you don't need the French language resource files for Excel, don't delete them. This change prevents Excel from starting. But, you can still configure preferences for each app.

App icons

When you deploy Office on a Mac, the app icons aren't automatically added to the dock, but are available from Launchpad. You can provide your users with instructions on how to add app icons to the dock.

Version numbers

The major version of Microsoft 365 for Mac, Office LTSC for Mac 2024, and Office LTSC for Mac 2021 is 16.x. Since the major version is the same, application settings, including policies, preferences, and preference domains are similar for the three versions of Office for the Mac.

Also, add-ins and other extensibility solutions that were compatible with an older version will most likely be compatible with a newer version or require minimal testing. For example, when upgrading from Office LTSC for Mac 2021 to Office LTSC for Mac 2024.

Office LTSC for Mac 2024 has version numbers of 16.89 or higher. Office LTSC for Mac 2021 has version numbers of 16.53 or higher.