New Office installations will be 64-bit, not 32-bit. If you have 32-bit add-ins, watch out!

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From joep517: Here’s a note from the Office 365 admin center: Office ProPlus and Office 2019 will now be installed with 64-bit as the default setting.
[See the full post at: New Office installations will be 64-bit, not 32-bit. If you have 32-bit add-ins, watch out!]

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ch100, abbodi86, Elly

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Wow, 64 bits for enterprise-class software! How bold Microsoft is becoming in 2019!

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MrJimPhelps

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Heaven forbid they communicate accurately, but: It’s already started.

I was surprised by the 64-bit default on an Office 2019 install last Thursday (January 20th).

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woody

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Ah, don’t forget to mention that 64 bit software is bigger in size, so expect Office bloatware to increment even further. Isn’t storage cheap these days for a reason?

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Could be an issue if an Excel 64 bit user creates a huge report with thousands of columns and shares it with those running Excel 32 bit. I forget if a 32 bit user would see an error message, just not see all the columns in the report, or couldn’t open the file. Was a common problem for me when I worked in corporate America with global laptop repair parts usage reports.

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Microsoft has been singing the praises of 64-bit for a very long time in every area except MS Office, it seems. So they have finally gotten 64-bit Office to work correctly for most users! So can we say that the beta-test of 64-bit office lasted about a decade?

I guess we should be happy that they waited till they got it right before foisting it on everyone.

We’ll soon know if 64-bit Office is actually ready for prime-time.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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ch100

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@MrJimPhelps-

MrJimPhelps wrote:

I guess we should be happy that they waited till they got it right before foisting it on everyone.

I fear you are all too optimistic… Microsoft no longer cares how many bugs it pushes out; that its telemetry and AI can detect the bugs is what is important… so I doubt that they have managed to get it right, only that they’ve become confident that they can push buggy updates, cause data loss and crashes, and still have the marketing clout to tout that this results in the most secure products of all time, while they decide what group of hapless users is least valuable to them and thus, appropriate to sacrifice as beta-testers.

Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter

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Office 64-bit has always been ready for prime-time.
The only important issue is with 32-bit add-ons being widely in use, issue which mainly affects enterprise users. Add-ons like Titus or Janusseal for Outlook are good examples.
Most home users were able to safely use Office 64-bit for a very long time without any issues. Certainly Office 64-bit versions run only on Windows 64-bit versions.
Are there any advantages?
Generally speaking no, except for being aligned with the trend in the industry and something noticed by very few users doing complex spreadsheets which require or behave better with larger amounts of RAM.
32-bit processes are generally limited to 2 GB RAM, while 64-bit processes can address unlimited amounts pf RAM for all practical purposes as of 2018.

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I saw this post too, but can´t seem to find it anymore. Did they withdraw change?

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Still says so in https://support.office.com/en-us/article/choose-between-the-64-bit-or-32-bit-version-of-office-2dee7807-8f95-4d0c-b5fe-6c6f49b8d261#32or64Bit=Newer_Versions

 

The 64-bit version of Office is automatically installed unless you explicitly select the 32-bit version before before beginning the installation process.

To install either the 32 or 64-bit version of Office 365 or Office 2019, follow the steps in Install Office on a PC.

Important: If you install the 64-bit version, but want the 32-bit version instead, you must first uninstall the 64-bit version before installing the 32-bit version. The same is true if you installed the 32-bit version, but want to install the 64-bit version. See “Office (64-bit or 32-bit) couldn’t be installed” error.

If you’re still not sure which version, 32-bit or 64-bit is a better choice for you, see the section

… so yeah, you need to know in advance if you’ll need to care about that.

ch100 wrote:

Office 64-bit has always been ready for prime-time.

Well, I do distinctly recall a time when it wasn’t… but that was several releases ago. Since then it’s mostly been about add-on compatibility and the rest either VBA compatibility (there’s a line about DECLARE statements in VBA on the linked page) and some also about codecs, legacy libraries, and legacy file format compatibility.

Remember, back in the old days quick-save in Word caused the save to be a straight memory dump from Word’s working set…

ch100 wrote:

The only important issue is with 32-bit add-ons being widely in use, issue which mainly affects enterprise users. Add-ons like Titus or Janusseal for Outlook are good examples.
Most home users were able to safely use Office 64-bit for a very long time without any issues.

Well, safely is relative… if they had any math students in the house, 64 bit may have been safer since ~2010.

ch100 wrote:

Certainly Office 64-bit versions run only on Windows 64-bit versions.

Exactly. 32-bit Office 2010, possibly also 2013, could also run on Linux under Wine…

I wouldn’t claim 64-bit address space is unlimited, computing being the way it is… surely the 16 EB segment limit will be seen as small some day. But we’ve had segmented memory before, remember…?

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Thanx, I believe I had a serious tunnel vision problem looking for the specific post in the admin center… 🙂

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