You Don't Need Windows for Microsoft 365

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

The agency I work at runs on Microsoft 365. Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. The whole package. Like most offices in Germany do.

And part of my work did move onto a Windows machine this summer. I wasn't thrilled.

But for Microsoft 365 itself, I don't need it. Most of my day happens on a Mac. And since this weekend, on an old iMac running Linux. Ubuntu 24 LTS to be exact.

What works well

Almost everything a typical agency day needs.

Word, PowerPoint and Outlook run as native apps on the Mac. Teams too. Files sync through OneDrive and show up in Finder. Two people typing in the same Word file at the same time, one on Windows, one on a Mac, works fine.

SharePoint is a website anyway. It doesn't care what you open it with.

One Mac detail: the old Outlook for Mac stops working with Microsoft 365 accounts this month, per Microsoft. The new Outlook is the only way forward. If you still have the old one, switch now.

For texts, decks, mails, chats and shared folders, the operating system is not the question anymore.

Mac

The Mac is the nicer place for it. For me.

The apps look like Mac apps. They're pretty well designed and smooth. In fact, I have way less trouble with Microsoft apps on Mac than with Microsoft apps on Windows.

The hardware is also perfect. Quiet, powerful, the battery lasts. The heavy Windows machine at the office doesn't come close.

And, of course, since it's a Mac, there's a Unix system underneath, which matters when half my day is a terminal anyway.

That's my preference. People will disagree. That's fine.

Excel is a bit of a mess. I mentioned it in my suite comparison. Power Pivot doesn't exist on the Mac AFAIK. No Data Model, no DAX. Power Query is there, but it only connects to a short list of sources compared to Windows. And Access doesn't exist on the Mac at all. Which is the only component I need Windows for in the agency right now.

VBA macros run on the Mac. Many of them, at least. Some older ones call Windows-only parts and can break.

If your job is building financial models in Excel, this article is probably not for you.

Linux is cool for Microsoft apps too

Who would have thought?

I just installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on an iMac from 2017. Quad-core i7 with 4.2 GHz, 32 GB of RAM, a 2 TB Fusion Drive, a Radeon Pro 580. Apple stopped updating it at macOS 13 Ventura. A few years old.

With Ubuntu, everything runs great. Fast, snappy. No issues.

But obviously, there is no native Microsoft Office for Linux. No Word, no Excel, no Outlook. Microsoft even retired the Teams app for Linux in December 2022.

But there are the web versions. Which Microsoft pushes anyway. And they've gotten pretty good. So you can work with Microsoft 365 on Linux no problem. Use Brave or Chromium, open Word, Excel, PowerPoint on Web… and done.

That sounds worse than it is, honestly. And it doesn't stop with Office.

• Teams and Outlook run as web apps as well. As PWA (progressive web app), you can add them to your dock and they feel like native apps almost, with their own icon and window.
• OneDrive and SharePoint files through abraunegg/onedrive, a free open-source sync client that also handles SharePoint libraries. Microsoft doesn't make one.
• Everything else I do is already Linux-friendly. Git, the GitHub CLI, Claude Code. They run natively, of course.

One small lesson from the first days with my old iMac and Ubuntu: Snap packages start slow on that old Fusion Drive. The .deb versions don't. So I install everything as .deb where I can.

Downsides, of course

Excel for the web can't run VBA macros. Microsoft says so on its own help page: you can open the file and edit it, but you can't create, run or edit the macros. So on Linux, that one weird macro template is a dead end.

The web apps need a stable connection. I have that.

Other than that, it's pretty easy. I could also simply use open source tools all the way, like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice. But I wouldn't have an alternative for Teams with all the agency channels and communication.

Who can switch

You can probably skip Windows if most of your day is:

• Mail, chat and meetings
• Word and PowerPoint
• Excel for lists, tables and simple pivots
• Shared folders in SharePoint or OneDrive

You probably shouldn't if you live in Power Pivot, write VBA, use Access, or depend on Windows-only add-ins.

Bottom Line

A Microsoft 365 agency is not a Windows agency anymore. Doesn't have to be.

The Mac does almost all of it. And an iMac Apple gave up on a few years ago does a lot of it too with Linux on it.

That's quite something for a nine-year-old computer.

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