16 GB

I think it depends on what you are doing. I work with Word and Excel and 4GB RAM is perfectly okay for me. Word is mostly text, not a lot of images inserted. Files aren’t that large, usually under 5MB.

This for Macbooks and Windows laptops. I have laptops with more than 4GB RAM that I use, but my main laptop has 4GB RAM (a Windows laptop without a lot of stuff running in background) and it has no problems.

For a laptop primarily used for office work, 8GB of RAM is considered a decent amount of storage. This should be sufficient for running most office applications, including Microsoft Office, without experiencing any performance issues. However, if you tend to have multiple programs open at the same time or if you work with large files, you may want to consider upgrading to 16GB of RAM.