Microsoft Office on Apple M1 Macs
I had a client recently who bought a new M1 Macbook Pro. He needed some help because he said his MS Office / Word application running on his M1 and Big Sur would not authenticate. I screen shared with him and we tried to uninstall and reinstall MS Office and still would not authenticate. Office said it was running under Rosetta 2 of course as there is not a native M1 version at the time of writing this post (Dec 2020) I searched for information on the web about which version of Mac MS Office would work, even on Microsoft’s website and while specific information about Office and the new M1 Macs was sparse, it did seem to say that Mac Office 2019 would work. We downloaded that again, installed and same issue, seemed to just hang and go in circles so it was unusable. Very frustrating Microsoft!
Finally after some more research we seemed to glom onto the idea of using the IOS version of Word, as Big Sur can use (some) IOS apps. We went to the App store and that did seem to work, so just FYI if you have trouble with your new M1 and Office, try using the IOS version of Word, etc. If you don’t see it with the “cloud icon” to download, first get Word app on your iPhone/iPad. Then when you go to the App Store on your M1, you should see the app with the cloud icon, meaning you have downloaded it before, then try installing Word on your M1.
Some people have discussed using iMazing to get “unofficial” IOS apps onto their M1 computers.
If you have this issue, and any additional info, please leave a comment below.
Hope this helps!
