Microsoft announces 64-bit version of Office for Windows 11 on ARM

The 64-bit ARM version is available to Office Insiders running Beta Channel Version 2106 (Build 14217.20002). Currently, Microsoft Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word are enabled as ARM64 while other applications will run in x64 emulation mode.

Microsoft Office will support the new 64-bit version with the recently announced Windows 11 on ARM devices. The new version of Office has been recompiled for the ARM architecture to run fast, bring greater memory availability, offer better support large documents, and maintain compatibility with the existing 64-bit add-ins, the company said on Monday.

The 64-bit ARM version is available to Office Insiders running Beta Channel Version 2106 (Build 14217.20002). Currently, Microsoft Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word are enabled as ARM64 while other applications will run in x64 emulation mode.

The ARM64-enabled Office applications are labelled as x64 compatible. Office on ARM64 is built as an ARM64EC (Emulation Compatible) application, which allows for the ARM64 code of Office to interoperate with x64 code of legacy add-ins.

To try out the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office for Windows on ARM, you need to use a Windows device running on an ARM processor and Windows 11 Insider Preview build. Additionally,

• Uninstall any 32-bit versions of Office, if currently installed
• Install Office using a most recent copy of the installer from office.com.
• Thereafter, join the Office Insider program and update to the current Beta channel build

Also, there are some known issues in this release including:

Teams integration with Outlook is not yet complete

• Users won't be able to organize Teams meeting from within Outlook because the Teams Meeting button is missing from the ribbon. You can use the Teams app to set up your Teams meetings.

Some Search features do not yet work properly

• In Outlook, certain types of searches, such as messages from the same conversation, will not return results.
• In OneNote, search speed is slow since it can’t use the index.
• When using Windows to search for Office files, no results will be returned.
• In Visio, shape search returns no results.