On November 10, Apple will celebrate a new event in which it will see the light the next generation of Mac computers, a generation that will be characterized as the first to implement Apple Silicon, the processors designed by Apple with ARM architecture that it already officially presented at the last WWDC.
Although they have not yet been officially presented, Microsoft has been working for some time on the Office applications that will be available for these new teams, Excel being the first of the applications that has just been released. add support for ARM processors of the new generation of Macs.
The version of Excel compatible with Apple Silicon is now available through the Office Insider program, the Office beta program, a version that has been available since November 2 and that offers support for processors designed by Apple thanks to the TSL v1.2 communication protocol.
As we can read in the notes of this beta, Microsoft states that:
This feature provides support for SQL Server ODBC data connections to function properly on newer devices that have Apple Silicon processors, as well as support for SQL servers that require secure connections through the TLS v1.2 protocol.
This Excel functionality allows users to access data from SQL server databases using ODBC drivers. If we take into account that the application is still in beta, it is likely that Office users who bet on this new generation will have to wait a few months until the release of the final version.
At the moment both Word and PowerPoint and the rest of the applications that are part of Office, still do not offer support for Apple Silicon, so the waiting time can be long. Fortunately, thanks to the Rosetta 2 emulator, users of new Macs with ARM processors will be able to continue using Office without any problem.