Microsoft issued a preview of Office for the Mac ARM-based laptops

Microsoft has issued a preview of Office for the Mac that will run natively on the new hardware. Microsoft in a recent press meet has issued a preview of Office for the Mac that will run natively on Apple's upcoming ARM-based laptops. The Redmond, Wash. Company also modified its Intel-based macOS Office applications so that they run on Apple's newest, Big Sur, and have been optimized for translation by Rosetta 2 the built-in technology that makes it possible to run older software on the ARM silicon inside.

The latest, a Universal App iteration of Office, was released to the Beta channel of Office Insider, Microsoft's preview program, on November 11^th. A Universal App is one with binaries that run on Intel-based and Apple Silicon Mac hardware. Users must have an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 account to join Office Insider, and thus experiment with the Beta of the Office Universal App. Instructions on installing the Beta are available here.

Also this month, Microsoft updated the Office applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and OneDrive to include the latest optimizations for macOS Big Sur, which is the first operating system to support Apple Silicon. On M1-powered systems, Big Sur also known as macOS 11 relies on Rosetta 2 to run existing Intel-based applications. Rosetta does this by translating Intel-based code into code that runs on the M1 SoC.