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Microsoft Office now available on all Chromebooks
Microsoft has been testing out its Office apps on Chromebooks for the past year, but they've been mainly limited to Google's latest PixelBook device. It now appears that testing has concluded, and a number of Chromebooks are now reliably seeing the Office apps in the Google Play Store for Chromebooks. Chrome Unboxed reports that the apps are showing up on Samsung's Chromebook Pro, Acer's Chromebook 15, and Acer's C771.
The apps are Android versions of Office which include the same features you'd find on an Android tablet running Office. Devices like Asus' Chromebook Flip (with a 10.1-inch display) will get free access to Office on Chrome OS, but larger devices will need a subscription. Microsoft has a rule across Windows, iOS, and Android hardware that means devices larger than 10.1 inches need an Office 365 subscription to unlock the ability to create, edit, or print documents.
Also at Engadget.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:11AM (1 child)
It's impossible to be fully bug-for-bug compatible with MS-Office without actually being MS-Office. Some documents won't open or render "correctly" without the real McCoy. By "correctly" I mean matching MS-Word, even if misinterprets or illogically renders or inserts formatting meta data to do it.
I once read that MS tried to rewrite Word around the mid 90's to use cleaner coding techniques, but couldn't get backward compatibility to fully work. Some existing documents depended on bugs to look how they did. MS thus decided to keep most of the rendering engine code as-is. Mutants live.
Edge seems to have a similar problem: its bug profile doesn't match Internet Explorer's such that apps that only work in IE often don't work in Edge. MS is not compatible with itself.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:51AM
Even newer versions of Office aren't bug compatible with Office. My office (a Fortune 500, albeit on the lower end) switched everyone to Office 2016 a few months after it came out and then promptly switched everyone back to 2010 a few days later, as both Word and Excel were causing all sorts of problems due to improper rendering or formulas giving different results. They finally got most of those fixed, but we still run into issues with emailed documents in both directions.