Microsoft adds real-time collaboration to Office for Mac

Microsoft has released a major update to Office 2016 for Mac systems, including the ability to collaborate on documents in real time. According to the company, the Windows, Mac, iOS and Android versions now share a single codebase.

Microsoft reports in the release notes of version 16.9.0 that the collaboration feature in Word, Excel and PowerPoint displays a symbol in the top right corner of the screen for each editor of a document. This functionality is comparable to that of, for example, Google Docs, which keeps track of who works with the same document in the same way. To use the feature, the document must exist in OneDrive or SharePoint Online.

There are other changes in the update, including support in Excel for using more than one thread. According to Microsoft it marks the first time in 20 years that “Office has been built on the same codebase across all platforms,” ​​including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. The shared code is C++, with each platform using its own code to communicate with the operating system. With this, Microsoft says it wants to introduce more new functions.