Is Microsoft And Mac The Same
Microsoft Excel Shortcuts for Mac and Windows (complete), This content is about Excel shortcuts. First, As we know that knowing Excel shortcut keys are very essential and vital for every Ms. Office workers. Second, by knowing Excel hotkeys, you can save loads of time and make your task even easier.Third, using the mouse all the time reduces your productivity. Microsoft Word is a word processing application that was first released on the Mac in 1985. The word processor differentiates itself from text editors such as Notes by providing a robust platform with advanced features including spell checking, embedded objects.
2019-1-24 That slow clap you hear spreading around the internet today could be due to the fact that Apple has finally added Microsoft Office to the Mac App Store. Once installed, users have the same. To install Office 365 or Office as a one-time purchase, visit accounts.microsoft.com on the PC or Mac that you want to install Office on. Sign in with the Microsoft account that you used to purchase, or have already associated, with the subscription or one-time purchase product, and then follow the onscreen instructions to install Office. Microsoft Office Home and Student 2019 provides classic Office apps and email for families and students who want to install them on one Mac or Windows 10 PC for use at home or school. Classic versions of Office apps include Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
By William Gallagher
Wednesday, May 08, 2019, 08:58 am PT (11:58 am ET)
On Monday, Microsoft announced that it officially released a test version of Microsoft Edge for the Mac. It's a remarkably, surprisingly solid app even in this pre-launch edition. Even that we already know that its missing a couple of key features, still you can get a feel for whether Microsoft Edge is worth replacing Safari as your main browser.
A key reason that this early version is so robust, though, is the same reason that Microsoft has made this move at all. The company didn't set out to make a Mac browser, it set out to convert its existing PC Edge into using Google's Chromium system. That gets it a solid base that happens to also give it a Mac version.
And it's what makes the Mac version of Microsoft Edge look very like the Mac version of Chrome. If you were thinking of moving from Safari and didn't want to risk a pre-beta developer version of Microsoft Edge, you could download Chrome and you would get pretty much the same feel.
Not measuring specs
This is about how Edge feels in comparison to Safari, it's not about benchmarking or measuring anything. That wouldn't be either fair or even all that useful given how unfinished this release of Edge is.
That said, you can make some broad comparisons that are interesting. For a browser that looks like Chrome, for instance, Microsoft Edge currently takes up around a third less disk space than Google's offer. But then if you're tight on space, Safari is a head-scratching is-that-really-right ten times smaller than Edge.
Safari is also less CPU intensive than either the currently-shipping Chrome or this developer Edge.
We all tend to describe our preferred browser, whichever one it is, as feeling light and responsive and fast compared to the others. The key word there, though, is feeling. If you were checking out Activity Monitor while running these browsers or if you are on a MacBook with little space, you'd unquestionably say that Safari was the lightest.
Microsoft Edge showing AppleInsider's front page.
You're supposed to say that Edge is the fastest. That's a key promise from its Windows version, that Microsoft Edge will be faster than any of them. So far, we're not seeing that. We have no complaints about how quickly it loads any website we tried with it, but we haven't been knocked out either.
That speed, along with the final disk space requirement, is something we'll have to come back to when this ships. There's good reason to hope that a final release will be quicker, but there's also reason to expect that it will be bigger, too, because this version of Edge is missing a couple of features.
What's missing
There's nothing missing that you actually need in a browser, nothing that isn't working. What's missing are some extra features —but these could be what makes you decide to move to Edge.
Arguably the most appealing is a feature called Collections, which will help you save and organize material that you find on the web. It's going to be like Safari's reading list, but rather than that bookmarking kind of feature, Collections will be a research tool. You'll be able to drag images and text into it, and then share some or all with others.
Less thrilling, but possibly needed for people in corporations, is IE Mode. This will be the whole, horrible, long-forgotten Internet Explorer built into Edge so that, if you need it, you can use in-house sites that require the old standard.
Taste
Even before we get any of these, though, there is a feature that might tempt you away from Safari, and it isn't Bing. While that search engine is, unsurprisingly, promoted on the startup page of Edge, if you scroll down, you also get news. A collection of headlines and stories from Microsoft News is right there in your browser's main page.
Microsoft News is fine. We've compared it before to both Google News and the basic, non-subscription tier of Apple News.
Here it's just a little extra touch, and ultimately it's the little things that make the difference. Features are great, and are also easy to compare, but it's the feel of a piece of software that matters. That's got to be more so with browsers than with just about anything because you will spend so much time using it.
In theory, every browser should render every website perfectly, but you know they don't. This isn't a reason to switch browsers, but it is a reason to always have two on your Mac, and on your Windows box too.
Beyond that, though, every browser does render every website in a different way. The buttons and controls are different and if you're used to seeing a site in Safari, it is noticeably different when you try it in Firefox.
Microsoft Edge displays its settings in a web page. Separately, you can always see the source code for any site you visit.
We would never argue that the color of a button or the shape of a slider is vital, but we will always maintain that overall this look and feel is extraordinarily important.
In which case, the look and feel of Microsoft Edge gives away its origins. This is a very Chrome-like browser, but it's also a rather Windows-like one.
Where every Mac app has its preferences in a separate kind of window, Edge —and Chrome —have all their settings on a web page. It looks like a web page, it takes up a tab, it is shown in the main window of the browser. The only difference is that instead of beginning with http:// and being a remote website, it's a local one whose name begins edge://.
You're not very likely to type edge://settings/appearance into your browser tab, but you could.
Maybe if you're a more technically-minded person, maybe if you're spending a lot of time adjusting settings, you'd find that faster and friendlier than clicking through buttons and tabs. And you can easily imagine a situation where you create TextExpander snippets to make entering them fast and convenient.
We did get a peculiar issue when we wanted to search the web having just been in a settings window. Edge attempted to search for 'local curry restaurant', but prefixed it with edge:// for no reason that we could fathom —or, actually, reproduce that often. This is a very early beta, after all.
Safari
This look and feel makes Edge seem about the same as Chrome to us. It's lighter than Firefox, though we just tend to get exasperated by how we launch Firefox because a site isn't working just right in Safari and we have to schlep through its constant updating.
Edge feels more full-featured than Safari, yet that's just an impression we get from how many settings are thrown at us. In another very Windows-like move, Edge comes with choices for how your tabs look and because the options are there, you must be shown them and you must be shown them immediately. Unable to really judge how the different tabs look until we used them in anger, we picked one in a shrug and haven't gone back.
There are more useful, and oddly less in your face, options to set up profiles where your Office 365 account is linked to your browser, but we've muddled through with Outlook online on Safari without issues.
Then Edge, and Chrome, also make more of a meal about downloads. It's as if Safari expects you to download something now and then, where Edge thinks you're in this to do a lot. So where Safari has a download icon, which only appears when you've actually downloaded something, Edge presents a download manager.
To swap or not
Intellectually, we know that it's going to be the forthcoming Collections feature that should sway us. That's the part that has the most use, that makes Microsoft Edge the most different from Safari.
And yet those of us who happen to prefer Safari to, for instance, Chrome, already know that we aren't really that likely to make the move to Edge, either.
It's good that we have the option, though we have to be aware that it's practically an accident of birth that means we get a Mac version of Edge only because there's a Mac version of Google's Chromium system.
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Word on the Macintosh is basically Word for Windows re-compiled to run on the Mac. It's not just 'compatible'. It's not just 'like' Word for the PC. It is Microsoft Word, the same one Microsoft makes for every platform. However:
- Not all of the modules of Word on the PC are included in Word for the Mac.
- Word for the iPhone and Word for the iPad are quite different.
- Word for the web browser (Office 365) is completely different: a very lite version.
The cost and number of person-hours spent developing Word is mind-boggling. It's well over a billion dollars, and there are well over ten thousand person-years of effort in it. Making a new one just for the Mac would have been so expensive that a copy of Word would cost several thousand dollars. You might buy two at that price, but the rest of us couldn't afford it!
Because it is the same software, and Microsoft has a policy of bringing the two versions closer together, the differences will become less over time. Essentially, each version on the PC is matched a year later by a version on the Mac (Microsoft is trying to reduce that gap, recently the Mac Business Unit became part of the main Office Business Unit that makes Office for every platform).
Macintosh | Equivalent PC Version |
Word 2013 | |
Word 2010 | |
Word 2007 | |
Word 2011 | Word 2003 |
Word 2008 | Word 2002 |
Word 2004 But we are also encouraged by the stories of our readers finding help through our site. During these challenging times, we guarantee we will work tirelessly to support you. Microsoft word for mac. We will continue to give you accurate and timely information throughout the crisis, and we will deliver on our mission — to help everyone in the world learn how to do anything — no matter what. | Word 2000 |
Word v.X | Word 2000 |
Word 2001 | Word 2000 |
Word 98 | Word 97 |
Word 6 | Word 95 |
Word 5 | Word 6 |
Same File Formats Used in Mac and PC
Mac Office MVP Jim Gordon writes: 'The Microsoft Office file format Open XML (OOXML) is for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and used on both the Mac and the PC. The file format was accepted by an international standards body. Office 2010 for Windows with service pack 2 or later and Office 2011 for Mac comply strictly with the standard. Office 2008 for Mac and 2007 and 2010 for Windows prior to service pack 2 comply about 98% of the way to the standard (there's a very minor exception in Excel).
'Microsoft also ships a set of fonts with the same names on both Microsoft Office for Mac and PC. The fonts distributed with Mac Office have been very carefully adjusted ('hinted') so documents on the Mac will look and orint the same way as documents using the PC versions of those fonts on the PC. The differences are tiny, but they account for the differences in the way the Mac places pixels on the screen.
'As for having documents be identical when moving from one computer to another there are factors you must consider. This is true PC to PC, PC to Mac, Mac to Mac, and Mac to PC. Microsoft Word is a word processor that has text that flows, unlike a PDF or page layout program. Any difference in font or printer driver from one machine to another has the potential to affect spacing, breaks, window & orphans, paragraphs, etc. To repeat - these changes have nothing to do with Mac to PC, rather they are caused by computer to computer differences.
'Your documents should look the same on the Mac as long as ALL of these conditions are met:
- The documents on the PC originated in Microsoft Word 2010 with service pack 2
- The documents were saved in a current OOXML file format in Word 2010
- The documents used only fonts supplied with Microsoft Office 2010
- Old versions of the same fonts are not installed or active on either the Mac or the PC
- The documents are opened on the Mac in Microsoft Word 2011
- The current versions of the Microsoft Office fonts are active on the Mac
- The printer driver on the Mac behaves identically to the printer driver that was being used on the PC where the documents were saved.
The behavior of Word is identical on the two platforms, provided the above conditions are met, if you want your documents to look alike when moving from one computer to another - regardless of platform. It's the fonts, file formats and printer drivers that are the sticky points when moving a document from one computer to another regardless of platform.'
Rules of Thumb
Having said all this:
- It’s a totally moving target. Every patch Tuesday, something changes.
- Network Templates 'Don’t' work in Mac Word. Due to multiple bugs in the file path resolving and handling mechanism, templates in network directories should not be shared between PC Word and Mac Word. For a long and happy life, copy the templates locally to the user's My Templates folder on the Mac.
- Ribbon Customizations are not available in Mac Word. They will be silently ignored, unless done in code, where they will blow up.
- Mac Word can use ONLY TrueType fonts and OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines. Other fonts will not appear/work or occasionally, crash.
- The color table is markedly different between Mac and PC (and even between PowerPoint and Word/Excel on the Mac). Generally Mac Office has a wider gamut, but Mac monitors have a very different gamma. Unless you are prepared to create color profiles and carefully color-match every device in the chain on both the PC and the Mac, just accept that colors are going to look quite different. It is expensive and time-consuming to fix this, and you will never get it perfect.
- Various commands in Mac Word exist only in the menu bar, which Mac Word still has, or on the toolbars that Mac Word still has. Toolbars remain customizable in Mac Word.
- The same physical printer will often produce different results from the same document depending on whether the printer driver is on a Mac or a PC. If the printer driver is running on a Print Server, results will be closer (but remember: the fonts are different!).
- Design for the Difference, Design for Re-Flow. Do not use hard page breaks anywhere. Minimize section breaks. Use paragraph properties to manage pagination. Assume your user is going to throw an A4 document onto a US Letter paperstock, or vice versa. Assume that a Mac will reflow text by about half a per cent. The people who have real trouble are the ones that have used floating text boxes and spaces to try to line things up: that will produce word-salad. Tossed word-salad…
Jim says 'The text-flow problem is the same as you will find moving from one PC to another where font versions and default printer driver are different. The fonts provided by Microsoft should provide smooth cross-platform sailing provided the same version of each is the active version on all machines involved.'
Differences in Appearance
On each platform, Word adopts the default appearance of the Operating System. There is almost nothing that you see on the screen that is drawn by Word: on the Mac, the display is created by Mac OS; on the PC, by Windows. It saves money and it saves vast amounts of disk space and processor power.
The only difference you are likely to notice is that if you are in OS X, the window controls are on the opposite side to Windows.
Different Keystrokes
On the Mac the Command (Apple) key is the Control Key in Windows, whereas the Control Key from the Mac is the Right-Click in Windows.
On a Windows keyboard, the Control key is always labeled Ctrl. On a Mac keyboard, expect to find the ⌘ or ? symbol on the Command key. (These characters will not display on the PC; they should look like this:.) This paragraph is a classic example of the cross-platform font difficulties you will experience. There is no default font common to the PC and the Mac that contains both of those characters (in case you are interested, that's 'Lucida Grande', the most wide-ranging of the Mac OS X Unicode fonts).
Word is very right-click-centric. If you do not have a two-button mouse, you will find it is a very worthwhile investment if you are going to spend much time in Word.
Windows | Macintosh |
| Control Key | Command (Apple) Key |
| Right-Click | Control-Click |
| ctrl+c | Command+c |
| ctrl+v | Command+v |
| ctrl+s | Command+s |
| File>Close | Command+w |
| ctrl key | Option Key |
| ctrl+q | Command+Option+q |
| ctrl+space | Ctrl+space |
| Tools>Options | Word>Preferences |
| File>New Task Pane | Project Gallery |
| Mail Merge Task Pane | Data Merge Palette |
The Control-Click (or Right-Click) brings up the 'context menu' wherever you happen to be. In Word almost everything you want to do, or everything you want to know, will appear on the right-click. The menus that appear vary dramatically depending on where your mouse-pointer is.
Word also responds to the scroll-wheel if you have one. (Not all windows; for example preferences and options dialogs do not..). Mouse scroll wheel support in Word pre-X depends totally on the mouse drivers. Microsoft drivers for the Microsoft Mouse generally work (and will often drive other companies' mice!).
In Windows, the keyboard shortcuts are listed in the Help, in a topic surprisingly enough called 'keyword shortcuts'. On the Mac, only some of the keystrokes are listed, in various topics such as 'About using shortcut keys' and 'Select text and graphics'. To find the list on either platform, use Search from the Microsoft Office Help to look for the word 'keyboard'.
You can look at the Key Assignments by using Tools>Customize>Keyboard on either platform. If you select a command, and it has a key assignment, the Customize dialog will tell you what it is. This is a better place to look than the Help, because users can (and should) change their keystrokes to suit themselves on either platform. Microsoft picture it download for mac. The Customize dialog also includes a handy Reset button if you decide you do not like the keystrokes you inherited from the previous user on that computer.
Finally, each version of Word enables you to print a list of the currently-assigned keystrokes so you can stick them on the wall. To print them on the Mac:
- Go to Tools>Macro>Macros
- In the Macros In pop-up menu, click Word Commands
- In the Macro name box click ListCommands
- Click Run
- In the List Commands dialog, click Current Menu and Keyboard settings and OK
- On the File menu, click Print.
You do it exactly the same way in Windows, or see here for a more extensive pre-built list.
One keystroke that will catch you out a few times is Command + h. Ctrl + h in Windows is the shortcut for the Replace dialog. On Mac OS X, Command + h hides the application! Use Command + Shift + H for the Replace dialog on OS X.
With OS X, Apple changed some of the keystrokes reserved for the operating system and added some new ones. On each version of Mac OS, Word follows system convention.
Some Mac keyboards do not have a Forward Delete key. Word needs one: there is a difference in Word between Forward Delete and Back Delete. You will strike it most often in tables: in a Table, Delete becomes 'Clear' which removes the cell contents without removing the cells. Use Cut to delete the cells themselves. Back Delete will remove text within a cell but has no effect if more than one cell is selected. If you are on a Mac laptop, the Forward Delete key is probably Function + Delete.
The Mac has an Option Key, Windows does not have an equivalent. Generally what you expect from the Option key will be on the Control Key in Windows.
Three very commonly-used shortcuts are Command + c (Copy), Command + v (Paste), and Command + s (Save). On Windows these are Ctrl + v, Ctrl + c, and Ctrl + s.
A keystroke that may catch you out a few times is Clear Formatting: on the PC it's Ctrl + q to restore paragraph formatting to that of the underlying style, and Ctrl + Space Bar to restore character (font) formatting. On Mac OS 9, they are the same. On Mac OS X, these are Command + Option + q and Ctrl + Space Bar.
Later versions of Word have an Edit>Clear>Formats command on the Menu bar, which will save you trying to remember the other two. However, note that Clear>Formats resets the formatting back to the formatting of Normal Style (it applies Normal Style) whereas the individual commands simply reset a paragraph to the formatting of the current style.
Different Menus
One thing that will catch you out all the time is that on the Mac, Word adopts the Mac convention of having a Preferences command. In OS X it's on the Application (Word) menu, in OS 9 it's on the Edit menu, again, following the OS convention. On the PC, this is Tools>Options on the Tools menu. It's the same thing, the tabs are exactly the same inside.
Word on the Mac still has a Work menu you can put on your menu bar; this has been replaced by the Task Pane (which is nowhere near as convenient) in later versions of PC Word.
Mac Word also has a Font menu which the PC lacks.
Different Print Mechanism
In order to display a document in WYSIWYG mode, Word needs to know a lot about the capabilities of the printer the document will eventually be sent to.
In Windows this is very simple: Word reads all the information it needs from the printer driver for the printer set as the Windows default. On the Mac, it attempts to do the same thing, but the mechanism is vastly more complex. Look here for more detail.
Some Features Didn't Make it
Making software is a depressingly manual activity. Every line of code has to be planned, typed, and checked. There are more than 30 million of them in Microsoft Office. There simply was not enough time and money to bring all the features of PC Word across to the Mac. And some of them we wouldn't want, anyway! Most of the omissions are of interest only to solution developers:
- Font embedding is not supported on the Mac.
- Customized toolbar buttons are supported on the Mac, but the Icon Editor is missing.
- Speech recognition is not available.
- HTML support in Word for the Mac is not at the same level as it is in Word on the PC: many web pages load as a shattered mess. The code stripping utility HTMLFilter2 available for the PC is not available for the Mac.
- Word on the PC has a menu item enabling you to Export to Compact HTML. On the Mac, this is an option on the File>Save As Web Page menu option named Save only display information into HTML. The other option, Save entire file into HTML is the equivalent of the Word PC's Save As Web Page; it saves a Word document expressed in XML. Note: if you 'Save only display information', the file looks the same, but the structural information and content that enable Word to reconstruct a Word document from the XML file has been removed.
Fonts Can be a Problem
On the PC, you can use characters with impunity: if the PC does not have the font, it will find the closest font that contains the character. On the Mac, in Word 2004 and above, you can use the exact same range of characters because Word 2004 is running in Unicode; however, because you cannot embed the font in the document, you need to make sure that each character that you use exists in one or more of the Unicode fonts your recipient has. If in doubt, for PC compatibility, use only the fonts that Microsoft supplies.
Microsoft includes a pack of fonts with Mac Office that have been very carefully hinted to display and print the same on the Mac as the same-named fonts do on the PC. Although the Mac can happily use PC fonts, the rendering of those may be subtly different, particularly on the high-res Mac displays.
Jim Gordon reports that he has no problems at all with the following list of fonts:
Arial
Calibri
Cambria
Candara
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel
Times New Roman
Microsoft Mcsa Expiration
Verdana
Meiryo
Jim says 'Office for Mac has a very nice feature to make font compatibility a cinch. When you choose a font using the Home tab of the Ribbon, the first item in the list is Font Collections. The easy way to ensure compatibility is to choose fonts from the Windows Office Compatible font collection submenu.
'If you have company specific fonts they must be installed onto each Mac in order for Mac Word to use them. There is no work-around to the restrictions John mentioned. Fonts embedded by Windows Word are ignored.
'I haven't had problems with cross-platform differences with our HP, Epson, and Lanier printer drivers, but we do test for differences before purchasing so that we don't run into such problems.
While there's no interface on Mac Word to make Font Themes and Color Themes (you can do it in PowerPoint, or with VBA), Themes made on PCs will work on a Mac.
The Advanced Typography settings you can apply in Mac Word will display in Windows Word, but there's no Advanced Typography interface in Word for Windows, so you have to use Mac Word for this feature.
VBA a Level Behind
The VBA level in Mac Word is markedly less capable than in PC Word: around the level of Word 2003 but with missing bits.
The Same Is True
Visual Basic for Applications on the Mac is at version 6 (on the PC, this is Word 2000 level of VBA); Word 2013 on the PC is at version 7. Code you write on the Mac will run on the PC if you are careful. Expect code you write on the PC in Word 2000 or above to generate compile- or run-time errors on the Mac.
Active-X controls will not work on Macs. 'Legacy' controls will work. Some of the latest controls from 2103 won't work on a Mac.
Developers should read George Clark's article for more detail.
ActiveX is not supported on the Mac at all. If you create userforms, use only the controls provided in the Forms Toolbar on the Mac, anything else you bring from the PC will generate an error when the user opens the document.
Digital Signatures are not supported on the Mac, and neither is code signing. You will not be able to open a signed project in Mac Word. If the signature prevents you from changing a macro, the code will be execute-only on the Mac.
Is Microsoft And Mac The Same Computer
AppleScript is not available on the PC. VBA is very powerful: investigate scripting your application from AppleScript with VBA, using the 'Do Visual Basic' command.
The Same With As
The VBA Integrated Development Environment is severely cut back on the Mac. If you plan to develop much VBA, invest in a copy of Virtual PC: the productivity you gain is enormous. Hint: Use Windows 7 and NTFS disk format.