Windows machine to Mac Mini with M1 chip...

[LongforDodd]

My Windows machine for home office use has a spinning HD that may need replacing. It's a 5 year old Dell with an i3 processor. We only use it for basic stuff. I'm considering buying the basic Mac Mini with an M1 chip to replace it but I'm reading that you can't run Windows programs on it (Word, Excel). What minimum level of Mac would I have to have in order to be able to use Word and Excel?

 

[slugboy]

You can buy office for the Mac--it's compiled especially for the Mac. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/15/22176548/microsoft-office-native-m1-apps-apple-silicon-support
If you have Office 365, you'll just download the Mac version of Office.

You "can" get VMWare or Parallels and run a virtual copy of Windows on your Mac, but doing that for Powerpoint and Word and Outlook? Not my cup of tea.

There are other recommendations for Macs, but the disc storage on Mac Airs and consumer hardware is pretty slim. Most people either want cloud storage or an external drive.

You will get plenty of advice, I'm sure

 

[LongforDodd]

You can buy office for the Mac--it's compiled especially for the Mac. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/15/22176548/microsoft-office-native-m1-apps-apple-silicon-support
If you have Office 365, you'll just download the Mac version of Office.

You "can" get VMWare or Parallels and run a virtual copy of Windows on your Mac, but doing that for Powerpoint and Word and Outlook? Not my cup of tea.

There are other recommendations for Macs, but the disc storage on Mac Airs and consumer hardware is pretty slim. Most people either want cloud storage or an external drive.

You will get plenty of advice, I'm sure

Interesting. So the guy bitching about not being able to use Word, etc. on the Costco site was as clueless as me. Thanks for the help.

 

[slugboy]

Interesting. So the guy bitching about not being able to use Word, etc. on the Costco site was as clueless as me. Thanks for the help.

Microsoft Office for Mac has been available for about 30 years. Microsoft made a legal agreement to Apple to keep making it back in 1999 as part of the anti-trust settlement.

The M1 chip is new, and maybe it wasn’t available when the poster asked about it. Looks like Costco stocks Office for Mac, and it has run on Apple Silicon since 2020: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...-silicon-c55b603e-14a6-4b69-bdc0-2bb4c9a36834

 

[GTNavyNuke]

I really like the ACER Windows machine I got with solid state hard drive. Runs Office great. Something like


I buy a new computer for me or my wife every 3 years and don't do any really heavy usage on the home machine. My work laptop does much much more but has to. So I buy a lower priced computer and it has far more than I need. (I'm not into games except maybe backgammon which is trivial.)

 

[takethepoints]

Or you could just get LibreOffice and do all this stuff for free. It has:

Word processing, spread sheet, presentation, drawing formula-writing, and database capabilities and I believe I mentioned this is all free. You can also use the Apple apps that code with the machine. I use those and LYX, the windowing version of LaTex. Print set documents look great and LYX takes care of a lot of bothersome tasks (alphabetizing ref lists, for instance) for you. Have fun with the machine.

Btw, all of this stuff translates MS documents of all sorts and comes with export to Windows formats. If you like that sort of thing.