MS Office on M1 Mac vs. MS Office on Intel Windows PCs

MS Office on M1 Mac vs. MS Office on Intel Windows PCs

For the last 12 years, I have had both Windows PCs and Macs (simultaneously). The single thing that prevented me from definitively moving to a Mac is Microsoft Office. I can use Windows PCs exclusively, but I cannot afford to use Mac only because of Office. I depend on Microsoft Office for work and for academic purposes. As everybody uses Microsoft Office, I simply cannot use something else if I want to keep 100% compatibility. And the fact is that I like Microsoft Office as well, as it provides a package of full-featured polished software.

There is, of course, Microsoft Office for Mac. But the thing is, Microsoft Office for Mac does not come close to Microsoft Office for Windows in many respects. There is Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the features are almost all there. But the Windows version is more polished and provides much better performance. Mac users complain about Microsoft Office because it is bloated and heavy, and that is indeed true, but for the Mac version. The Windows version is a fine piece of software that has no parallel.

I recently ran a test on memory usage with several documents, on different word processors, that showed me exactly that. The table below shows how much memory (in MB) each of the software used to open a Word file with the number of pages shown in the first column. The documents were very different, some had tables, others lots of fields and cross-references. I used the latest version of all the software below.

The results show that Word for Windows is superior in memory usage to all other software. And it feels lightweight, despite having so many features. When working on a Mac environment, Pages is usually lighter than Microsoft Word and does a good job at converting documents, even though it lacks features. Microsoft Word feels slow and lacks the performance of its Windows counterpart. Mellel is full-featured and even lighter than Pages, which is impressive, but the implementation of the features is unique, so it is not ideal in terms of compatibility. Nisus Writer Pro is a real memory hog.

Although Pages and Mellel are fine, Microsoft Word for Windows is still the gold standard. It is a great word processor, as it has more features than any of the competitors and still manages to be the one which uses less memory. Nothing comes close to it.

I have seen comparisons of how Microsoft Office runs better on an M1 Mac than on an Intel Mac. I also saw several comparisons on how the M1 processor is superior to Intel. However, I have no interest in Photoshop or video editing. My real question is how Microsoft Office for Mac running on an M1 processor compares to Microsoft Office for Windows running on an Intel 11th gen processor. Does the superiority of the M1 processor compensate the inferiority of Microsoft Office for Mac? How are they side by side?