One of those moments that some of us did not understand is that Microsoft offered Windows 10 ARM and yet the office suite par excellence was not a native app. Above all, because with Windows RT we had the Office suite on ARM. Now it seems that with Windows 11 the waters will return to their course and Microsoft Office will work as a native 64-bit app.
Things as they are, when we were able to test the Surface Pro X the result was spectacular with the Office applications. If more was demanded, the device suffered, but it worked very well. However, with this new update Office will be practically native.
Office goes to ARM64 with Windows 11
Insiders we can already try the first preview version of Windows 11. Now, we can test another key element in Microsoft’s strategy, the 64-bit Office compiler for ARM. The application has been recompiled for the ARM architecture, improving performance and with greater efficiency reducing memory consumption. Microsoft announced the ARM-optimized version of Office last week, but now it begins to reach users.
Microsoft explains that the new version of Office should have a better overall appearance and handles large documents better on devices like Surface Pro X But, it will also now work with 64-bit add-ins compared to the emulated version of Office.
The big secret is that Microsoft leads by example by using the new ARM64EC technology, which stands for ARM64 Emulation Compatible. As we have already indicated, this technology allows developers mix and match code that is natively compiled for ARM64 along with the code that runs in emulation. As a result, applications with dependencies that do not natively support ARM64 they can be run partly as native applications and partly in emulation.
As you already know, Office has x64 code and legacy add-ins They are not built for Windows 11 on ARM. With ARM64EC, Microsoft can rebuild large parts of the application to run natively on ARM deviceswhile older components run in emulation.