Office Insiders have been busy lately. Microsoft first released the beta version of Office that came with a fresh user experience and a user interface that is aligned with the UI of the upcoming Windows 11.
And now, the company has released of the 64-bit version of Office meant for users rocking Windows 11 on ARM. It was announced last Monday, of course, but the bits were only made available towards the end of last week.
This version significantly improves the performance of the productivity suite compared to the emulated version that Windows 10 on ARM users have to contend with. In other words, UI and performance both, are optimized.
As the Office Insider team explains:
“This new version of Office is designed specifically for the next version of Windows on ARM. It has been recompiled for the ARM architecture to run fast, bring greater memory availability, offer better support large documents, and maintain compatibility with existing 64-bit add-ins using the new x64 emulation capability provided by Windows.”
Swell.
This first Office on ARM64 build is an ARM64EC app. And this means that it supports legacy elements that have not been recompiled for the ARM64 architecture yet.
For now, only Word, Excel, PowerPoint Outlook, and OneNote have been optimized for this architecture, the rest of the apps are still running in emulation mode. But that should be no issue at all in terms of usability, and the pieces will align in time once Redmond gets around to building them.
If you own a Qualcomm powered device like the Microsoft Surface Pro X, then you will need to install the recently released Windows 11 Insider build 22000.51 before you get to try the 64-bit version of Office for ARM on your machine.
Simply join the Office Insider Program and update to the current Beta channel build. Prior to that, just ensure that you have uninstalled any 32-bit versions of Office, if you had them installed. And then installing Office using the most recent copy of the installer from office.com.
Do that, and your new Office awaits you!
