Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?

[MacBH928]

For reasons I signed up for office 365. This thing must be programmed by buffoons. It reminded my why quit Windows 20 years ago.

I almost swear in 20 years of running Mac and ios, this software gave me the worst experience of functionality and it errored, froze, and crashed more than anything else. I cant believe people rely on this joke for a living. Not only that but I am sure they make it purposely incompatible with non-office formats to make you “think” their formats are corrupted and you have to use office for best experience.

When I used Pages and Numbers things were smooth sailing even when i didnt know how to do things it was easy to figure out and easy to navigate the menus. So much more intuitive.

I tried the joke that is Macos version, I am not sure on the Windows version either. I cant recommend this software to any one except one that wants to have compatibility with what everyone else is using.

I know Excel can do pretty amazing things… that is IF you were able to get it working right.

 

[4sallypat]

For reasons I signed up for office 365. This thing must be programmed by buffoons. It reminded my why quit Windows 20 years ago.

I almost swear in 20 years of running Mac and ios, this software gave me the worst experience of functionality and it errored, froze, and crashed more than anything else. I cant believe people rely on this joke for a living. Not only that but I am sure they make it purposely incompatible with non-office formats to make you “think” their formats are corrupted and you have to use office for best experience.

When I used Pages and Numbers things were smooth sailing even when i didnt know how to do things it was easy to figure out and easy to navigate the menus. So much more intuitive.

I tried the joke that is Macos version, I am not sure on the Windows version either. I cant recommend this software to any one except one that wants to have compatibility with what everyone else is using.

I know Excel can do pretty amazing things… that is IF you were able to get it working right.

I use a corporate version of Office 365 and I can download the apps onto Mac or PCs up to 5 devices.
Plus I can use the cloud version and all my files synchronizes.

Works very well - even though most of what I do is on Google.

It's nice to have both as they interoperate.

 

[phrehdd]

For reasons I signed up for office 365. This thing must be programmed by buffoons. It reminded my why quit Windows 20 years ago.

I almost swear in 20 years of running Mac and ios, this software gave me the worst experience of functionality and it errored, froze, and crashed more than anything else. I cant believe people rely on this joke for a living. Not only that but I am sure they make it purposely incompatible with non-office formats to make you “think” their formats are corrupted and you have to use office for best experience.

When I used Pages and Numbers things were smooth sailing even when i didnt know how to do things it was easy to figure out and easy to navigate the menus. So much more intuitive.

I tried the joke that is Macos version, I am not sure on the Windows version either. I cant recommend this software to any one except one that wants to have compatibility with what everyone else is using.

I know Excel can do pretty amazing things… that is IF you were able to get it working right.

I jumped ship from Windows at about the same time as you. I recall when we had to at work put Vista "on the bench" and see if it was viable for the company. With Vista being the direction MS was taking, I was quite happy to check out Apple as it was with Intel and had Unix-like underpinnings. I have not ever considered going back though I have had Windows in VMs for a couple of apps.

As for Office - I recall when Word was a miserable experience with Word Perfect (DOS) and Ami Pro were efficient programs. MS did its thing to bully out competition and here we are...decades later with bloated software offerings. To me, it really doesn't matter much anymore. I don't use any fancy features and if I use a spreadsheet now, it doesn't require "power macros." Pages and Numbers work well and some of the free suites as well (Libre Office etc.). I do use Word now for school. (Yes I am an old guy who went back for more punishment.) Word is the only option we are given and while I have converted Pages to docx files, it sometimes doesn't quite line up and I can get graded down.

 

[Tagbert]

For reasons I signed up for office 365. This thing must be programmed by buffoons. It reminded my why quit Windows 20 years ago.

I almost swear in 20 years of running Mac and ios, this software gave me the worst experience of functionality and it errored, froze, and crashed more than anything else. I cant believe people rely on this joke for a living. Not only that but I am sure they make it purposely incompatible with non-office formats to make you “think” their formats are corrupted and you have to use office for best experience.

When I used Pages and Numbers things were smooth sailing even when i didnt know how to do things it was easy to figure out and easy to navigate the menus. So much more intuitive.

I tried the joke that is Macos version, I am not sure on the Windows version either. I cant recommend this software to any one except one that wants to have compatibility with what everyone else is using.

I know Excel can do pretty amazing things… that is IF you were able to get it working right.

I have none of the experience that you present. I use Office at work using a corporate 365 account. The software is stable and does what I need it to do. It is not hard to “get working right”. Perhaps something is wrong with your installation?

 

[MacBH928]

I jumped ship from Windows at about the same time as you. I recall when we had to at work put Vista "on the bench" and see if it was viable for the company. With Vista being the direction MS was taking, I was quite happy to check out Apple as it was with Intel and had Unix-like underpinnings. I have not ever considered going back though I have had Windows in VMs for a couple of apps.

As for Office - I recall when Word was a miserable experience with Word Perfect (DOS) and Ami Pro were efficient programs. MS did its thing to bully out competition and here we are...decades later with bloated software offerings. To me, it really doesn't matter much anymore. I don't use any fancy features and if I use a spreadsheet now, it doesn't require "power macros." Pages and Numbers work well and some of the free suites as well (Libre Office etc.). I do use Word now for school. (Yes I am an old guy who went back for more punishment.) Word is the only option we are given and while I have converted Pages to docx files, it sometimes doesn't quite line up and I can get graded down.

One would think a $1T company can re-write this software which is critical for a lot of businesses and governments to work better.

If you are looking for DOCX compatibility I hear OnlyOffice has the best compatibility with Word but I am not sure who their customers are. Office is the real thing and cheaper per user + you get 1TB storage.

I have none of the experience that you present. I use Office at work using a corporate 365 account. The software is stable and does what I need it to do. It is not hard to “get working right”. Perhaps something is wrong with your installation?

Are you using it on Windows or Mac?
I downloaded it from App Store on MacOS. I have office 16.77.2 , which one do you have? When i signed up for subscription they gave me free trial and download link to the beta installer. Not sure why!?

 

[chrono1081]

I have to for work. That being said I much prefer Numbers, Keynote, and Pages to Microsoft Office.

 

[ignatius345]

I'm in an all-Mac office, which is great. We use Pages and Numbers quite a bit internally, but often the simplicity of working with everything in-browser makes it lower friction for us to collaborate with Google Workspace. That also lets us loop in PC-centric clients.

We also use Microsoft Office quite a bit as well, because that's what our clients use. We've got a big deliverable we have to do in PowerPoint -- and even though Keynote is a much more polished product, it's a non-starter because everything they're doing is gonna live in SharePoint. Same with Excel in other situations.

 

[phrehdd]

I'm in an all-Mac office, which is great. We use Pages and Numbers quite a bit internally, but often the simplicity of working with everything in-browser makes it lower friction for us to collaborate with Google Workspace. That also lets us loop in PC-centric clients.

We also use Microsoft Office quite a bit as well, because that's what our clients use. We've got a big deliverable we have to do in PowerPoint -- and even though Keynote is a much more polished product, it's a non-starter because everything they're doing is gonna live in SharePoint. Same with Excel in other situations.

I concur, Keynote is a much better experience. Shame that it doesn't always convert well to Powerpoint (ppt) as I would love to use it for official and academic use.

 

[sracer]

One would think a $1T company can re-write this software which is critical for a lot of businesses and governments to work better.

If you are looking for DOCX compatibility I hear OnlyOffice has the best compatibility with Word but I am not sure who their customers are. Office is the real thing and cheaper per user + you get 1TB storage.



Are you using it on Windows or Mac?
I downloaded it from App Store on MacOS. I have office 16.77.2 , which one do you have?

MS Office on Mac OS is terrible. I believe part of that is deliberate on MS' part.

MS Office 365 on Windows works fine. I dislike the requirement to periodically connect online to "refresh" the license and the background Office 365 processes that run. I have an unlimited perpetual license for MS Office 2010 Professional so I use that on all of my personal Windows systems.

 

[ignatius345]

I concur, Keynote is a much better experience. Shame that it doesn't always convert well to Powerpoint (ppt) as I would love to use it for official and academic use.

I tried with very limited success to get it to be used in a previous job at a very PC-oriented company. No matter how well presentations would go when we rustled up a Mac for them to run on, at the end of the day everyone wants a PPT they can edit.

 

[phrehdd]

I tried with very limited success to get it to be used in a previous job at a very PC-oriented company. No matter how well presentations would go when we rustled up a Mac for them to run on, at the end of the day everyone wants a PPT they can edit.

Fully agree that is why it is sad that Keynote doesn't always convert well to Powerpoint where Powerpoint can edit.

 

[EdwardC]

I have perpetual license’s of Office for Mac 2021 for my M1 and M2 pro minis which can routinely be purchased for around $30.00. Word and Excel are blazing fast on both machines. Much more so than Pages which I do like but is not as polished.

 

[Tagbert]

One would think a $1T company can re-write this software which is critical for a lot of businesses and governments to work better.

If you are looking for DOCX compatibility I hear OnlyOffice has the best compatibility with Word but I am not sure who their customers are. Office is the real thing and cheaper per user + you get 1TB storage.



Are you using it on Windows or Mac?
I downloaded it from App Store on MacOS. I have office 16.77.2 , which one do you have?

Mac
16.77.1 I’m probably getting the update next week.
I don’t recall if it was from the App Store or from Microsoft originally. The updates come via the updater app.

You can argue about features and UI and such but stability has been fine. Functionally it does what I need it to do. If I needed to query databases all day long, I might not use the Mac version but that sounds like a boring job anyway.

 

[MacBH928]

I'm in an all-Mac office, which is great. We use Pages and Numbers quite a bit internally, but often the simplicity of working with everything in-browser makes it lower friction for us to collaborate with Google Workspace. That also lets us loop in PC-centric clients.

We also use Microsoft Office quite a bit as well, because that's what our clients use. We've got a big deliverable we have to do in PowerPoint -- and even though Keynote is a much more polished product, it's a non-starter because everything they're doing is gonna live in SharePoint. Same with Excel in other situations.

I found out that its a lie that you have to use MS Office for work environment. Unless you are doing the complex/programmed stuff in Excel, Apple suite should be more than sufficient and probably more sane and pleasant.

If you already have Office, and indeed you collaborate with others, why would you use Apple suite at all?

I have an unlimited perpetual license for MS Office 2010 Professional so I use that on all of my personal Windows systems.

You get free updates forever? I don't imagine a 2010 software would work on any recent macos

Fully agree that is why it is sad that Keynote doesn't always convert well to Powerpoint where Powerpoint can edit.

story has it that not even Office documents are 100% with every office version

 

[sracer]

You get free updates forever? I don't imagine a 2010 software would work on any recent macos

I said that I use MS Office 2010 Professional on my Windows systems. 😁

 

[adrianlondon]

I said that I use MS Office 2010 Professional on my Windows systems. 😁

Please tell me you're running Vista 😆

 

[sracer]

Please tell me you're running Vista 😆

😂 nope, Windows 10. MS Office 2010 is more compatible with the latest version of MS Office 365 than anything else (including LibreOffice)

 

[ignatius345]

I found out that its a lie that you have to use MS Office for work environment. Unless you are doing the complex/programmed stuff in Excel, Apple suite should be more than sufficient and probably more sane and pleasant.

I can't send a Numbers document to a client on a PC. End of story.
But thanks for telling me why I'm wrong! Really helpful contribution here. 👍

 

[unrigestered]

Office 2010 also doesn't have the ribbon toolbar IIRC
while it might not look as fancy, i think i'm actually preferring it usability wise

 

[Tagbert]

Office 2010 also doesn't have the ribbon toolbar IIRC
while it might not look as fancy, i think i'm actually preferring it usability wise

Also in modern versions of Office you can hide/show the ribbon with Opt-Cmd-R to make more space, if you like.

 

[MacBH928]

I can't send a Numbers document to a client on a PC. End of story.
But thanks for telling me why I'm wrong! Really helpful contribution here. 👍

indeed you can. Export as Excel document. I did this for myself and it opened in Excel and LibreOffice. The formatting won't be 1:1 but it depends on your use case.

 

[MacDaddyPanda]

Probably because some of us were using Windows MS365 or Office 365 either prior to jumping to Mac or for work/school. And are deep into the MSFT OFfice ecosphere. In My case I was just a long time Windows user. Only recently jumped to Mac as my daily driver or normal computing stuff. Windows for gaming only now. Plus it is a good product.

 

[unrigestered]

Also in modern versions of Office you can hide/show the ribbon with Opt-Cmd-R to make more space, if you like.

maybe... nowadays i'm only using Office at work and that even only for really light use like taking notes or doing searches in some excel sheets.
for personal use it's been iWork for me for the past 10+ years or so with LibreOffice joined the club quite recently too now.

having said that.... we've recently switched to some new version of Office 365 which appears to be browser based.
again, only used it VERY briefly, but keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+U or CTRL+B didn't seem to work for some reason?!

 

[MacBH928]

Probably because some of us were using Windows MS365 or Office 365 either prior to jumping to Mac or for work/school. And are deep into the MSFT OFfice ecosphere. In My case I was just a long time Windows user. Only recently jumped to Mac as my daily driver or normal computing stuff. Windows for gaming only now. Plus it is a good product.

What is your opinion of Office on MacOS compared on Office for Windows

 

[EdwardC]

What is your opinion of Office on MacOS compared on Office for Windows

I use both Mac OS and Win 11; Office is a better experience on Windows for sure but Word specifically on the Mac is in my opinion a better experience than Pages for a few reasons (simple things like autofill of the date and tabbing over from a collum that is Bold you don't have to uncheck Bold as you do in Pages). That said I do like Pages but today as an example Office Home and Office 2021 for Mac is $32.97 for a perpetual license through Mashable. I have purchased 4 licenses over the past year through them with no issues. It's honestly a no brainer to have the gold standard for so little......Ed