Any thoughts on Microsoft Office?

[eyoungren]

I just like using MS Office, it’s a personal preference. Also, I use to be a Microsoft MVP so I always got Office for free. But even before that, I use to religiously buy new versions of the suite: XP, 2000. Part of this entrenchment started in high school when I started on Office 97. A big part of the appeal was how complete and integrated the suite is: word processing, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, PIM, database management and desktop publishing.

I remember persuading my dad to buy Office 2000 Premium which included web site creation and graphics. Office was and still is such a standard. Where I work, I see some key people creating some very complex and dense word documents. You want great document fidelity when collaborating with others. Also Office has great MS Teams interoperability. So that gives it quite a lock on the market for productivity suites.

Also, the Mac users where I work swear by it.

For my personal use though it’s kinda waned. I have three Office 365 subs I got through the Microsoft Company Store. Those will probably last me until the end of 2025. After that I’ll probably switch over to a perpetual version of Office or LibreOffice.

The one (related) Office product I completely despise is Microsoft Exchange. I had to support that PoS on a Windows SBS 2003 Server and trying to keep up with mailbox quotas before clients started getting messages about their InBox being full was a PITA!

I've forgotten stuff about that piece of crap that I hope I never have to remember. Was so glad when the boss finally told me to switch everyone to the email provider's IMAP!

 

[Rooster 🐓]

OP: buy yourself a cheap PC laptop or mini PC, install Office for PC on it and use Office on that PC. 100% file compatibility and no issues with Office for Mac, install files, functionality, etc. Stand-alone Office 2021 is regularly offered “on sale” for less than $50, so no ongoing 365 subscription required either.

With Silicon mostly killing bootcamp for 100% compatibility (Windows for ARM is not) the best way to go for anyone who needs Windows compatibility is old-fashioned bootcamp: a dedicated PC.

Pricing can get as low as baseline iPad or a few years of Parallels and you’ll have 100% compatibility. The right monitor can have more than one input so you can share a monitor. Some monitors have KVM so you can share a keyboard too. Or buy a little KVM box to share monitor & keyboard, etc.

The days of easily doing everything on a Mac are over. This is the easiest way to be sure you have full compatibility…and is probably longer-term cheaper too. All other options that don't involve a PC risk introducing at least minor file incompatibilities. The only way to have 100% compatibility with Windows files is a Windows PC... or older Intel Macs that- through bootcamp- could become a Windows PC.

If money is really tight you can't afford new, a recent model, USED PC would bring 100% compatibility too.

This is one reason why I made sure to get the last intel 16” MBP - bootcamp - a quick reboot into windows and MS Office.

 

[Silverstring]

Yeah. It sucks.

 

[f54da]

@Wowfunhappy
>I actually thought MS Office used Cocoa.
For 2011 at least, it's kind of a weird thing. I recall (may be wrong, been some time) that it used quite a bit of carbon apis. Main thing is that in terms of text editing it doesn't use the Cocoa provided text widget, in favor of its own. This can be a good thing since you get better spellcheck, might be a bad thing because some things like right-click text services don't work. I recall services launched from the menu do work though.

 

[Unami]

The newer verwions of iWork are better than the first ones after the "reboot".

I sometimes had to use an old version of Office on Windows (2010 iirc) at work, and imho it's an usability nightmare. Ugly, overly complicated, thousands of features, and a lot of them well hidden. The ribbons are just unintuive and often hiding basic functions you'd normally use every day. Microsoft always finds a way to make your life more complicated and unproductive by having you use the mouse a lot, adding sub-menus and non-consistent menus and keyboard shortcuts. If you need all the features Office offers, then you're f***ed and have to use it. We now got limited to the web-versions of Office365 at work and everything takes even more time. But employee productivity is harder to measure than Microsoft bills, so there we are. Also, you need office if you want 1:1 formatting - but afaik that's not even consistent between different versions of word.

If you just want to write text or get things done, I'd stick with pages/iWork.

 

[leman]

I’ve had to use MS Office a bit more as I was developing a software tool that generates reports in docx format and I find MS Word to be particularly atrocious. The ribbon UI is a disaster and a usability nightmare. It uses the space very badly, options are scattered around the tabs in unpredictable manner. Editing tables in particular is a nightmare as finer grained control is done via complex dialog boxes.

Pages might be less powerful in comparison but at least it presents fine control options and numerical input fields in a predictable and consistent manner.

 

[Bodhitree]

I used Office 2011 for Mac quite a bit with my 2011 MacBook Air, and always found it a solid, reliable product, though I didn’t use PowerPoint at all. As with all such products, getting used to the keyboard commands takes time but eventually you become fluent with enough use.

When I got my M1 iMac a year or so ago, I switched to using Apple’s suite, and I haven’t missed Office at all. Its nice to have software that is Mac-native, integrates well with iCloud and I’m looking forward to trying out the new collaboration features when the opportunity arises.

 

[Larsvonhier]

We´re happy using LibreOffice at our office and it´s quite astonishing how "compatible" the workflow and the results are compared to M$Office. File exchange with M$ users is also no deal any more...

 

[DENZIE]

Just get parallels and office 365 for pc. So much better than office for Mac.

(IT pro who is long time Mac user but wants to be as productive as possible).

 

[davigarma]

This. The design of Microsoft Office 2011 is unlike any other I have ever used, and it fits the Mavericks aesthetic very well in my opinion. (I use it on both of my Macs running Mavericks)

I have used Microsoft Office 2004, 2008, 2011, and Microsoft 365 2016 onward. I've also used iWork '09 among numerous other versions of iWork. Office 2004 and 2008 in my opinion is less good as 2011 and onwards due to the lack of the ribbon at the top. Instead, there is a separate formatting pallette window to the side which is not very space efficient and frankly inconveniently placed. To me, the ribbon on the top with all the icons is the whole reason I use Microsoft Office over iWork. The icons, their placement, and how they are divided in categories is so extremely intuitive for me. Being a lifetime iWork user, as soon as I started using Office I never looked back. Beyond the ribbon, Office 2011 is good being easy to use, filled with features, and great for compatibility. I would select it over iWork any day, unless you are trying to work with placing a lot of graphics on a page then sometimes I prefer Pages over Word. Also, if you are willing to make the switch because you will have to convert current iWork documents. There is a copy on the Garden I believe. The installer includes unnecessary apps (communicator, remote document connection, etc) but you can choose not to install them.

Comparing the ribbons of Microsoft Word 2011 (top) and Pages 2009 (bottom):
View attachment 2130522

In the month of November, Microsoft notified me that it was going to disable TLS 1.0/1.1 in Outlook 2011 for Mac on the 10th of this month due to the implementation of TLS 1.2. So far it hasn't happened but if it does it would give the new parameters for which we keep the old "Legacy" connections. Keep that in mind !

regards

 

[Exoticaleathers]

• Universal Software. ...
• Used by over 1.2 billion people and most businesses. ...
• Office 365 offers anytime, anywhere access. ...
• Online Support from Microsoft. ...
• Easy to use. ...
• Multipurpose. ...
• Security.

 

[mk313]

I'm in the 'Get Office for Mac' camp. I was a long-time user of both. I enjoyed iWork for the elegant look, and Office for the compatibility (and Excel just offers so much more on the spreadsheet side). I still have both on my Mac, but about a year ago, I started to transition everything over to office and havne't had any issues. There are certain things (keynotes decks for personal use, adding photos to word processing docs) that I find easier/better in iWork, so I still keep those around but I almost never open them anymore.

Since you mentioned compatibility with others in your initial post, it sounds like you'd benefit from moving to Office. Since you said money is't an issue, I'd recommend installing both and giving yourself a trail time period (one month, 6 months, whatever you can swallow and not be unhappy with). Put a reminder in your calendar and then wen the day comes, decide which one to keep. I'd then set another reminder a week or a few weeks out to uninstall the loser. That gives you enough time to convert all of your docs before you remove the software permanently.

 

[Boyd01]

I used MS Office on my Mac since the 2001 version, was using Office 2008 on my 2008 MBP at work until I retired in 2011 and it was fine for my needs. But I ended up using Parallels and/or Bootcamp when my company setup MS Exchange because the Mac version did not properly support calendars at that point (although I continued using the Mac versions of Word and Excel).

I continued using Office 2008 on my 2011 MacBook Air, 2013 MacBook Air and 2012 Mini up until MacOS Catalina. IIRC, it still worked but tended to crash a lot. Anyway, I switched to Office 365 at that point and have been happy with it ever since.

For more years than I can remember, I used ClarisWorks/AppleWorks and have a considerable amount of old personal and work documents in that format. Finally switched to Office because it just made things easier at work. Years later, I wanted to access some of those old documents and was surprised that the iWork suite could not read them. That's when I discovered LibreOffice, which I still use every now and then to access/convert these old files. But I always felt that LibreOffice was very slow and awkward. It's been a couple years though, so maybe it's improved.

My ex also used AppleWorks/ClarisWorks for everything and I set her up with LibreOffice back around 2015 when she finally upgraded to a new MacBook Air from her old PowerBook. Was helping her with some computer things a few months ago and found that she was still using it. Offered to add her to my Office 365 account (you can add something like 4 other users for free) but she would have none of it, she is very resistant to change, LOL.

 

[Wando64]

This. The design of Microsoft Office 2011 is unlike any other I have ever used, and it fits the Mavericks aesthetic very well in my opinion. (I use it on both of my Macs running Mavericks)

I have used Microsoft Office 2004, 2008, 2011, and Microsoft 365 2016 onward. I've also used iWork '09 among numerous other versions of iWork. Office 2004 and 2008 in my opinion is less good as 2011 and onwards due to the lack of the ribbon at the top. Instead, there is a separate formatting pallette window to the side which is not very space efficient and frankly inconveniently placed. To me, the ribbon on the top with all the icons is the whole reason I use Microsoft Office over iWork. The icons, their placement, and how they are divided in categories is so extremely intuitive for me. Being a lifetime iWork user, as soon as I started using Office I never looked back. Beyond the ribbon, Office 2011 is good being easy to use, filled with features, and great for compatibility. I would select it over iWork any day, unless you are trying to work with placing a lot of graphics on a page then sometimes I prefer Pages over Word. Also, if you are willing to make the switch because you will have to convert current iWork documents. There is a copy on the Garden I believe. The installer includes unnecessary apps (communicator, remote document connection, etc) but you can choose not to install them.

Comparing the ribbons of Microsoft Word 2011 (top) and Pages 2009 (bottom):
View attachment 2130522

That's a very old version of Word (well, indeed, 11 years old, obviously).

The latest version (16.68), licensed through Office 365, looks much slicker and smaller.
Besides, it is fully customisable.

 

[ww2_1943]

I like the current version of Office for Mac because it pretty much mirrors the Windows version. I didn't care for the older versions with different window panes. I preferred the integrated look of Word on Windows. Lately, I am utilizing Google Docs because my job is so tied to G-Suite. I used to work in Word and then upload the file to my Drive. Then I converted it to the Doc format and that usually required editing to fix. It just became easier to work in Docs from the get-go. I also stopped using Outlook as a client since I have to access Google Spaces and G-chat for work. It is just easier to use Chrome browser based Gmail.

That being said, I wish we could go back to MS Exchange and utilize One Drive instead.

 

[tensixturtle]

That's a very old version of Word (well, indeed, 11 years old, obviously).

The latest version (16.68), licensed through Office 365, looks much slicker and smaller.
Besides, it is fully customisable.

11 years isn't that old. Besides, how critical is it to have the latest cutting edge version of spellcheck? Functionality wise, when I am working on a document on Microsoft Office 2011 I find no reason to want or need to move over to my M1 to use the latest version of Office. Upgrading to the latest things are a huge part of the tech world and industry today, so part of the beauty of threads such as the Early Intel and Power PC forums are that people take the situation in their own hands, decide what they want, and stick with it to make it work. The whole point of this thread is to find a version of Office that works with the given constraints (a Mac running Mavericks) so suggesting a newer OS/computer/etc is not a viable solution in this case. Personally I'd rather use Office 2011 on Mavericks even if I could run the latest version. To me, one of the main reasons I use the OS is for the beautiful aesthetics and the latest version would look quite out of place there.

Edit: I don't mean to sound harsh and I apologise if it comes across that way. I also don't mean to single you out; I just felt like by this 3rd page the only suggestions were to upgrade which was missing the whole point of the question.

 

[mansplains]

I tend to use google docs or sheets for ease. However, Excel is fantastic and puts Numbers to shame imo. Some functions of Excel aren't available on macOS but are on Windows. The workaround is using office in browser, but I dislike that route generally, and you need 365. Pages is fine, but I still gravitate to google docs.

Depends entirely on your needs and work situation.

...this is only relevant if you need Office; and the truth is that as time has progressed, fewer people actually rely on it. Workspaces have changed significantly and a lot of what we need to do with these apps has been simplified in newer, cheaper services.

It really does depend. Previously, I could've stuck with LibreOffice on a RasPi. Microsoft played the market capture game like Adobe. Despite several less expensive alternatives, you're still expected to know the "industry standard" and how to use it. The difference with Adobe is that as a creative, you can still prove your ability with a robust portfolio. Like how I'm never going to pay $800/yr for Pro Tools when there's countless other DAWs I may record or compose within.

 

[Mr. Dee]

The one (related) Office product I completely despise is Microsoft Exchange. I had to support that PoS on a Windows SBS 2003 Server and trying to keep up with mailbox quotas before clients started getting messages about their InBox being full was a PITA!

I've forgotten stuff about that piece of crap that I hope I never have to remember. Was so glad when the boss finally told me to switch everyone to the email provider's IMAP!

On Prem Exchange has always been a beast to manage. It even got Hillary Clinton in trouble. Since the introduction of Exchange Online then subsequently Office 365 the need for on prem Exchange for most orgs has waned.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Also, lets not forget too, the history of Office itself and many of the modules were originally Mac programs.

The Microsoft Office for Macintosh was released on CD in 1989
Forethought which became PowerPoint was originally a Mac program.
Excel first launched on the Mac in 1985.

 

[ahurst]

I keep a copy of Office on my iMac because I get it for free from my institution, and because I need it for ensuring iWork exports don't have any weird formatting issues before I send them off. Everything else I do is in Pages and Keynote, which I've been using since iWork '09 and have grown deeply fond of (Keynote in particular is an excellent vectorized diagram creator).

Word 2011 for Mac was pretty nice, but versions since then have just felt more bloated and clunky. For example, Track Changes in modern Word has a considerably worse UI than the Pages equivalent, even though Pages struggles to handle Track Changes in tables for whatever reason.

 

[TheShortTimer]

11 years isn't that old. Besides, how critical is it to have the latest cutting edge version of spellcheck? Functionality wise, when I am working on a document on Microsoft Office 2011 I find no reason to want or need to move over to my M1 to use the latest version of Office.

Hear, hear.

I have written articles and academic chapters using this antiquated software and at no point has its venerability hindered me in any shape or form. Neither the editor who published my journalistic work or the faculty members who've assessed my doctoral research have raised any concerns that my word processor is archaic and needs to be replaced. They're not even aware of its age - because it has no bearing whatsoever on the quality of my output. The software works as it should and it allows me to fulfil my goals.

Upgrading to the latest things are a huge part of the tech world and industry today, so part of the beauty of threads such as the Early Intel and Power PC forums are that people take the situation in their own hands, decide what they want, and stick with it to make it work. The whole point of this thread is to find a version of Office that works with the given constraints (a Mac running Mavericks) so suggesting a newer OS/computer/etc is not a viable solution in this case.

Thank you for daring to highlight this. Unfortunately, many of the replies seem to have misunderstood or overlooked the tacit mission statement of this forum and the OP's desired outcome.

Personally I'd rather use Office 2011 on Mavericks even if I could run the latest version. To me, one of the main reasons I use the OS is for the beautiful aesthetics and the latest version would look quite out of place there.

I use Office 2011 all the way up to Mojave and the only reason that I don't use it beyond that is due to incompatibility with 32 bit apps.

 

[EugW]

A word of warning:

This week I installed my old 2017 version of Office Mac 2016 on my M1 Mac mini, and it would NOT open my recent Excel files correctly. Some of my Excel data was literally upside down and backwards. It was so weird. I didn't think Excel could even do that. Ironically, Pages in Ventura could open it just fine.

Furthermore, I couldn't update it anymore because the old MS AutoUpdater from that version did not connect to the MS servers correctly or something. However, my MS Office licence was still active and luckily MS still allows downloads of Office Mac 2016 (even though it's no longer supported), so I got the latest (and last) version of Office Mac 2016 from 2020 and that worked fine with the same files.

Moral of the story is that if you can't run a recently updated version of Office, you may run into document compatibility issues anyway.

 

[usagora]

I tried Office but it literally took over my Mac with all the files, auto updates program, and other crap it decided to install. One of the most off putting programs to install ever. Thankfully I have a work computer with the Office suite and if I need to do anything Office related on my Mac I just use Google's online suite that can import/export office files very easily albeit with limited functionality but that's much better than the bloatware MS seems to be.

As a daily Mac user of MS Office since 2008 (standalone versions and currently MS 365), I have no idea what you're talking about. I've noticed no negative impact on my system from having it installed and of course there's an auto-update program. I'd prefer that to having to continue to log in to their website to download updates!

The included 1TB of OneDrive storage is awesome!

However, people can try and decide for themselves. They can start out with a monthly subscription and then just cancel renewal if they don't like it after a few months.

 

[EugW]

I tried Office but it literally took over my Mac with all the files, auto updates program, and other crap it decided to install. One of the most off putting programs to install ever. Thankfully I have a work computer with the Office suite and if I need to do anything Office related on my Mac I just use Google's online suite that can import/export office files very easily albeit with limited functionality but that's much better than the bloatware MS seems to be.

As a daily Mac user of MS Office since 2008 (standalone versions and currently MS 365), I have no idea what you're talking about. I've noticed no negative impact on my system from having it installed and of course there's an auto-update program. I'd prefer that to having to continue to log in to their website to download updates!

I deactivated MS AutoUpdate, mainly because it can't download anything anymore anyway for my version of Office. Office Mac 2016's last supported update was 2020.

BTW, to install the 2020 version of Office Mac 2016 I mentioned above, I had to uninstall the 2017 version of Office Mac 2016 first. That involves dragging the main apps from Applications to the Trash, and then cleaning out some files in ~/Library, etc. Fortunately, there are step by step instructions from Microsoft online and it only takes a few minutes.

 

[Flash1420]

Microsoft Office is way better for both casual and professional users. Google docs gets really slow and sometimes freezes especially if it is a long document. I never liked iWork because of the lack of various tools that were offered on MS office. Also MS office offers way more templates than Apple or Google.