Microsoft releases native Office applications for Mac M1

Microsoft has released native versions of its leading Office productivity applications for Apple’s new ARM-based notebooks.

Collectively labeled as Microsoft 365 apps for Mac – previously tagged Office 365 ProPlus – The flagship applications Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word have been updated to run on MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini with Apple Silicon technology without the need for translation.

In systems powered by Apple’s new M1 system-on-chip, macOS 11, also known as Big Sur, uses Rosetta 2 technology to run existing Intel-based applications. Rosetta 2 translates Intel-based code into code that runs on the M1 SoC.

Instead of translating the code over and over each time the application is started, Rosetta 2 performs the translation once, before the application is run for the first time, then stores the translated code for later use. On the other hand, native applications do not require such a translation and therefore launch faster than Intel applications.

To eliminate confusion, developers can package the native and Intel versions of an application into a single binary, called a Universal Application.