Without going into the debate of which OS is better for a desktop computer, you may find yourself in a situation where you are using MacOS and involved in work that is related to Microsoft technologies like Dynamics 365 and/or Power Platform and wonder if everything will work in similar way as it would on a Windows. To answer that, in my experience below are few things that I found which had an Windows OS requirement and I had to switch either to a spare Windows that I had or use a VM.

Workflow Editor for Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM

When dealing with D365 Finance and Operation(or new names Finance and Supply Chain Management), you may have to build workflows for certain business processes. To be able to do that Workflow Editor is used which actually is a one-click application which won’t work on a MacOS.

Open in Excel

If looking to manipulate any data by open a form/list page in Excel on MacOS, you’ll encounter an error saying ‘This add-in is currently not available for use on your device’. This functionality/add-in is also only available to work on Windows.

Management Reporter Designer

Recently while working on a request from finance team to modify one of their financial report I stumbled upon a similar to workflow editor limitation where the management reporter designer won’t open on a MacOS computer and required Windows

Regression Suite Automation Tool (RSAT)

With all the ever growing need to customize D365 Finance, SCM and MPOS/CPOS to handle specific business scenarios comes a challenge where regression testing may become hectic and super time consuming. Thankfully Microsoft has a tool to automate such testing using the RSAT tool (which I personally love) but if you plan to use it on MacOS, you’re out of luck. RSAT requires Windows to run.

Power Automate Desktop

Isn’t it fun to see how Power Platform is evolving? And how easily several of your legacy repetitive tasks can so easily be automated so you can focus on other stuff? If you’re like me, you would have come across a task or two where you may have had to automate a process on a computer instead of running it on Power Automate as a cloud flow. If yes, Power Automate Desktop(it’s pretty slick and worth checking if you haven’t so far) is your tool however to use this, Windows OS will be required.

For me, thankfully it was just the development part where I ran into this requirement so I just used a Windows computer instead to develop and then my actual computer where the tool had to run was already a Windows.

Visio

Though a general tool, worth mentioning here as while working with D365 one may need to have a visual representation of business processes and architecture. For this purpose what better tool then Visio! Though some alternate tools are available for MacOS and even Power Point to some extent, I still felt the gap.

Have you come across anything that did not work for you on MacOS? Let me know in comments.