Why does Office 2016 have such high system requirements?

[djdelarosa25]

Office 2010's minimum is 512MB of RAM, Office 2013's is 1GB. Suddenly, Office 2016 needs 2GB of minimum RAM? Can someone please explain why?

 

Also, what Office version would be the best for my low-end PC with only 3GB of RAM?

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

because its designed for windows 10, and 4 Gb is optimal these days, gone are the 2Gb ram days. 

[djdelarosa25]

1 minute ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

because its designed for windows 10, and 4 Gb is optimal these days, gone are the 2Gb ram days. 

So Office 2010 is for 7, 2013 is for 8 and 8.1, and 2016 is for 10?

P.S. Why am I missing a lot of fonts? I have Office 2013 and I'm missing fonts like Tw Cen MT etc. My classmate has Office 2010 and he has those fonts.

[Enderman]

Because they are making these programs a lot more advanced to use the available resources that the majority of people have these days

[thatguyyouknow75]

Because it's now 2016 and a computer that fits the minimum requirements is very inexpensive. Roughly the same cost as the minimum requirements for the prior office releases when inflation is considered. Newer programs can't be expected to always support older technology. Apple has mastered this, it's called planned obsolescence and it's how they continue to make money. 

 

Upon reading what I wrote there is a bit of a snippy tone, that wasn't intended. Not tryna fire shots at anyone  

[vanished]

I can't imagine Office has really gotten that much more memory hungry since 2010; my bet is that they just don't want you running it (or trying to run it) on machines with less than 2 GB of RAM, since if you don't have 2 GB, windows probably isn't working properly on its own, never mind office as well

update: I just opened word, excel, powerpoint and onenote (2013) all at the same time and collectively they are using about 150 MB, so I can't imagine most people having an issue even if they only have 512 MB to dedicate to office.  Sure, some monstrous excel sheets can easily use more than 4 GB by themselves, but that's a very special case.

Edited February 2, 2016 by Ryan_Vickers