Word 365 for Windows and Mac
Finally Word for Mac 365 has the same version number and looks superficially like Word for Windows 365 but dig a little deeper and it soon becomes apparent that the Mac version is missing many of the most useful features of its Windows cousin. We are, of course, biased towards Windows, where most of our work is, and there may possibly be some useful features in the Mac version that don’t exist in Windows.
When developing templates to run on both platforms these are some of the problems that we’ve come across recently:
Themes
On Windows you can easily create color and font themes. On a Mac you can only create color themes in PowerPoint. You can only select from built-in fonts themes unless you know how to work in XML with unzipped files. (Luckily, we do).
Content Controls
On Windows you can insert and customise a range of content controls. On a Mac, you can’t insert or customise content controls, although Word does at least now recognise content controls inserted on Windows.
Building Blocks
On Windows you can create and categorise building blocks and use Quick Part previews. On a Mac you can only use AutoText via the menu.
Drawing Canvas
In a Drawing canvas on Windows you can nudge the shapes with the keyboard but you can’t use the alignment commands. On a Mac you can’t insert a Drawing Canvas but it does recognise one if the document was created in Windows. In a Drawing canvas on a Mac you can’t nudge the shapes with the keyboard but you can use the alignment commands, the exact opposite of what you can do in Windows.
On a Mac you can insert a PDF into Word. You can’t on Windows.
Colors
There are Mac sliders for CMYK colours. On Windows it’s RGB, sometimes in decimal, sometime hexadecimal.
Visual Basic for Applications
Word for Mac doesn’t fully support VBA and the Visual Basic Editor is beyond a joke.
Ribbon Customisation
On Windows you can use XML to customise the ribbon of a template. There appears to be no way to do this on a Mac.
If we are developing a template for use in Word for Mac 365 we will do it in Word for Windows, bearing in mind the problems listed above, and then test it on the Mac to make sure it still works. We know we can use themes and content controls and limited building blocks but we will avoid the drawing canvas, VBA macros and ribbon customisation.
Perhaps, one day, Microsoft will actually produce a product that is functionally the same on both platforms.
We live in hope.
