Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?

[MacBH928]

Excel in particular.

Numbers is great for small single sheet spreadsheet-y things.

Excel is literally the glue that holds large enterprise accounting departments together. So much of the use of excel is dumping something out of some crappy ERP application or in-house reporting system (e.g., CSV file or oBDC connection into SQL server), running a bunch of excel macros, and re-injecting the end result back into the ERP solution because Bob from accounting got the specific calculations out of excel via some formulas and VB macros that he needed to pipe back into the accounts during his lunch break 15 years ago, and paying the ERP vendor to do it inside of the application would have been a 1/2 million dollars and 6 months of project work. Bob’s excel spreadsheet has been critical to the monthly company report ever since.

Your typical enterprise is FULL of that. And few outside of accounts, payroll or IT realise it. Management don’t care, they got their monthly report.


IMHO that’s the reason for Office’s popularity. Word - can take it or leave it. Powerpoint is garbage. Outlook is a dumpster fire. But Excel and Onenote (if you use it) are great applications and excel carries the business world on its shoulders - Word/Outlook/Powerpoint merely come along for the ride.



edit:
and yeah, Keynote in the Apple suite is Apple’s killer app in its segment where Excel is microsoft’s.

I’ve done awesome presentations in keynote with almost zero effort with zero training the first time i played with it - doing anything similar in powerpoint is a nightmare.

The apple apps aren’t bad. But they didn’t save the company 15-20 years ago and become integrated into the business the way Excel did.

Yup, but Numbers is not really aiming to be an excel replacement more of an Excel alternative for the mere mortals. What I am worried about is that almost all companies/govs are relying on Excel which I do not feel comfortable with because I am never comfortable with monopolies. I wonder if any of the Excel alternatives like LibreOffice can do just as much if for whatever reason MS decides to put a crazy price on Excel some day.

I wonder what Apple uses internally, Numbers or Excel 😁

Yup. At my last job I tried (unsuccessfully) to get buy-in for using Keynote more because it was so much better than PPT and everyone could see how much better it was. At the end of the day they didn't want to buy more Macs so that was that.

well, to be honest, even if I was a manager of any company I won't be buying Macs just to use Keynote

 

[MacBH928]

question isn't why people use them, it's why some use Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Apparently the answers are good enough for minority, but a minority it remains.

The answer its free and does not need subscription and comes pre-installed on your device (IIRC) and easier to pickup and use over MS Office for the average joe. For the longest time I used Apple apps happily.

The more real question though is why does Apple bother creating and maintaining these apps since average Joe can get for FREE Office Online, FreeOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs/Sheet, Zoho Workplace, WPS Office, Onlyoffice

 

[mac-kitty]

I use Word, Excel, and Power Point to open documents that Windows users send me (I work part time for a major mental health organization). I tried to open a Power Point document in Keynote once, and the result wasn't pretty. I use Pages for things like typing a letter to print out for my personal use.

 

[lankox]

Office 2021 for Mac is $32.97 for a perpetual license through Mashable.

Microsoft Office Home & Business for Mac 2021: Lifetime License | Mashable

<p>Say hello to a lifetime of productivity! Secure all the MS Office 2021 apps with just one smart purchase from a Microsoft-verified partner.</p>

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Just bought and installed Office 2021 through Mashable. Now, after a restart, I have almost instantaneous Word, Excel, and PowerPoint launches. Thanks, EdwardC!!

 

[EdwardC]

Just bought and installed Office 2021 through Mashable. Now, after a restart, I have almost instantaneous Word, Excel, and PowerPoint launches. Thanks, EdwardC!!

Awesome!

 

[throAU]

But Excel? It's insane. I sat for a meeting with this numbers/database guy and he was using Excel to query some database and frankly I was lost. Numbers is great for individuals or even small all-Mac teams (like my current job). But it's not an enterprise solution and it's not trying to be.

I think the smaller the company or the newer the company the less critical excel is. But once a company reaches critical mass, it needs an enterprise scale ERP suite and they're all extremely costly to customise and out of the box they're all needing to be customised.

What ends up happening is the business deploys something like SAP, Pronto, whatever and then gets burned by the customisation cost. And instead of paying that, the guys who count things need to get their job done and work around the missing features with importing and exporting to excel. I mean I have end users who need 64 bit office because their spreadsheets won't fit in the 32 bit address space of 32 bit office.

If you're a smaller company you simply don't end up in that situation (distributed across multiple continent, complex financial structures, many concurrent users, etc.) - get away with a smaller scale financial package and numbers would be more than fine.

Guaranteed Apple will be using Excel in their accounting team. As mentioned above, Numbers is totally not aimed at the same problems that excel is. And that's fine. For the things numbers CAN do - it's much nicer to use.

 

[MacBH928]

Just bought and installed Office 2021 through Mashable. Now, after a restart, I have almost instantaneous Word, Excel, and PowerPoint launches. Thanks, EdwardC!!

Office license for just $30ish sounds so much better than a 365 $7/M forever subscription. What am I missing here? Do you get updates?

I know you get 1TB cloud storage but 5GB is more than enough for me. I mean how large can your DOCS or XLSX file be?

I have a bad taste from CodeWeaver's Crossover that provided NO updates once your purchased. I upgraded my MacOS and it stopped working. Had to pay another $60 or so to get the new version.

What ends up happening is the business deploys something like SAP, Pronto, whatever and then gets burned by the customisation cost. And instead of paying that, the guys who count things need to get their job done and work around the missing features with importing and exporting to excel. I mean I have end users who need 64 bit office because their spreadsheets won't fit in the 32 bit address space of 32 bit office.

What is the ballpark of the customisation costs are we talking? I would imagine a huge company should be ok with that. I am more worried about SAP or Pronto updating their software then my customization workflow breaks and now I have to pay again.

 

[EdwardC]

Office license for just $30ish sounds so much better than a 365 $7/M forever subscription. What am I missing here? Do you get updates?

I know you get 1TB cloud storage but 5GB is more than enough for me. I mean how large can your DOCS or XLSX file be?

I have a bad taste from CodeWeaver's Crossover that provided NO updates once your purchased. I upgraded my MacOS and it stopped working. Had to pay another $60 or so to get the new version.



What is the ballpark of the customisation costs are we talking? I would imagine a huge company should be ok with that. I am more worried about SAP or Pronto updating their software then my customization workflow breaks and now I have to pay again.

Yes the perpetual license is frequently updated.

 

[WanderlustSoul]

I prefer Office for Mac because I'm familiar with Windows PCs from years of working in traditional offices. I now work for a small company that uses Google Suite instead of Microsoft Office. Larger companies prefer Microsoft Office because Google Sheets has limitations.

 

[throAU]

What is the ballpark of the customisation costs are we talking? I would imagine a huge company should be ok with that. I am more worried about SAP or Pronto updating their software then my customization workflow breaks and now I have to pay again.

Depends how many customisations you have, but you typically end up paying maintenance on them and also to port them to the new version when you upgrade. So yeah not cheap.

We're talking thousands of dollars for the single customisation (never mind b.s. internal company politics and meetings to determine its exact functionality before spending money, consultants coming out to understand/scope/document the requirements, etc. before a line of code is even written) plus ongoing costs per year, vs. "Bob" in accounts just doing an export/import to excel and running a macro that he already developed himself in his lunch-break 10 years ago because they needed the report urgently.

That sort of thing is why Excel is the killer app for enterprise.

 

[weckart]

Excel in particular.

Numbers is great for small single sheet spreadsheet-y things.

Excel is literally the glue that holds large enterprise accounting departments together. So much of the use of excel is dumping something out of some crappy ERP application or in-house reporting system (e.g., CSV file or oBDC connection into SQL server), running a bunch of excel macros, and re-injecting the end result back into the ERP solution because Bob from accounting got the specific calculations out of excel via some formulas and VB macros that he needed to pipe back into the accounts during his lunch break 15 years ago, and paying the ERP vendor to do it inside of the application would have been a 1/2 million dollars and 6 months of project work. Bob’s excel spreadsheet has been critical to the monthly company report ever since.

Your typical enterprise is FULL of that. And few outside of accounts, payroll or IT realise it. Management don’t care, they got their monthly report.

This brings back memories. I have done consultancy at some of the bluest of blue chip companies who were burning millions daily on consultancy and yet critical parts of their organisation relied exactly on Bob on an old computer with Excel pulling out data from an Access database and after running VB macros all over them feeding the output back into Access, which was linked directly into online real-time pricing systems etc. Said Bob was usually in his 60s, retiring next year and nobody understood the homebrew system he had cobbled together over the years. It was always one Windows or MS Office update away from falling over. In the biggest enterprises, money tended to follow glamour projects more than where it was really needed.

 

[dogface1956]

Office license for just $30ish sounds so much better than a 365 $7/M forever subscription. What am I missing here? Do you get updates?

I know you get 1TB cloud storage but 5GB is more than enough for me. I mean how large can your DOCS or XLSX file be?

I have a bad taste from CodeWeaver's Crossover that provided NO updates once your purchased. I upgraded my MacOS and it stopped working. Had to pay another $60 or so to get the new version.



What is the ballpark of the customisation costs are we talking? I would imagine a huge company should be ok with that. I am more worried about SAP or Pronto updating their software then my customization workflow breaks and now I have to pay again.

You get security and maintenance upgrades for the version you purchased, but you will not get major upgrades to new versions of Office. However, that is not a big drawback when you are only paying $30 for the purchase version.

 

[MacBH928]

This brings back memories. I have done consultancy at some of the bluest of blue chip companies who were burning millions daily on consultancy and yet critical parts of their organisation relied exactly on Bob on an old computer with Excel pulling out data from an Access database and after running VB macros all over them feeding the output back into Access, which was linked directly into online real-time pricing systems etc. Said Bob was usually in his 60s, retiring next year and nobody understood the homebrew system he had cobbled together over the years. It was always one Windows or MS Office update away from falling over. In the biggest enterprises, money tended to follow glamour projects more than where it was really needed.

This is OOT but do enterprise build their own software, customise off the shelf ones, or just use a ready made one?

I have a small business and I can't believe I already can't find something ready made for what I want to do, at least without customization .

You get security and maintenance upgrades for the version you purchased, but you will not get major upgrades to new versions of Office. However, that is not a big drawback when you are only paying $30 for the purchase version.

what new upgrades I will miss on? MS Office is pretty mature, as long as its compatible with other Office documents and continues to work on the modern OS I have no problem. I pay $40 for 5 years of usage better than $8.25/user/month will be $96 a year.

I didn't think I would say this but I am impressed by MS options and prices.

 

[Isamilis]

Office license for just $30ish sounds so much better than a 365 $7/M forever subscription. What am I missing here? Do you get updates?

The missing part? You didn’t get office license on iPad / iPhone. For some people (including myself) this is a dealbreaker.

That sort of thing is why Excel is the killer app for enterprise.

During my busy day, I remembered in few occasions I talked to myself, excel is the biggest human innovation ever made 😂

 

[weckart]

This is OOT but do enterprise build their own software, customise off the shelf ones, or just use a ready made one?

I have a small business and I can't believe I already can't find something ready made for what I want to do, at least without customization .

A bit of both. industry norm software like SAP, Oracle etc is ubitquitous but within and on top of that are the said customisations.

The trouble with custom systems is that they take time and money to build, maintain and troubleshoot. If the people who know it leave, you effectively start from scratch, whereas you can recruit SAP specialists at a moment's notice.

 

[ipaqrat]

I have a small business and I can't believe I already can't find something ready made for what I want to do, at least without customization .

That's the nature of the beast - but maybe not the beast you thought. While people are a problem, people are also our only solution - until our robot overloads arrive. For example, there was no prebuilt remote management tool that could couple software deployment to an individual's meeting schedule, so they could be available for certain mandatory configurations. Until I built it...

A bit of both. industry norm software like SAP, Oracle etc is ubitquitous but within and on top of that are the said customisations.

The trouble with custom systems is that they take time and money to build, maintain and troubleshoot. If the people who know it leave, you effectively start from scratch, whereas you can recruit SAP specialists at a moment's notice.

Precisely! Continuing the example above: We used Microsoft SCCM for deployments. But it has no calendar interfaces. So, built a little VB script (this was in the days before powershell) to pull empty timeslots into MS Access, and build dozens of individual .xml files that were imported to SCCM as a batch. This would trigger installations while each user was AFK, and page an install tech to be waiting for the user when they were supposed to return. We only did this for the 40ish higher rollers - Undersecretary of This, Deputy Assistant Secretary of That, director of something, etc... The unwashed masses got what they got.

After a while, that crossed into "customized" territory, and however well it worked, we had to kill it with fire because out install team became too dependent on a house of cards.

It's interesting to ponder the differences between Microsoft's and Apple's DNA, which bears on how MS Office and Apple's "iWork" turned out:

• Microsoft wants to liberate every user to be their own developer, so they don't have to wait for pocket-protector egg-heads. Everything Microsoft does is @ 80% complete, with the remaining reserved for motivated, ambitious, self-teaching savants. Still, MS Office UI and basic feature set is solid. Though security fixes and feature releases often break things.
• Apple wants to liberate users from development, to provide capabilities every kid, teacher, parent, engineer and executive can start using right out of the box. Everything Apple does is 80% complete, with the remaining reserved for polite, patient feature requests. Still, Apple's dev tools are solid - for ambitious, self-teaching savants. Though security fixes and feature releases often break things.

 

[lankox]

Awesome!

I just upgraded to Sonoma, and now I'm back to 7-second launches of the Office 2021 apps after a restart. EdwardC, are you running Sonoma?

 

[EdwardC]

Correct Sonoma.

 

[MacBH928]

I just upgraded to Sonoma, and now I'm back to 7-second launches of the Office 2021 apps after a restart. EdwardC, are you running Sonoma?

this is part of my complaints about office, its finicky and bloatware. Sure it can do amazing stuff when it works, but....

 

[bushman4]

Are the apple equivelant apps such as numbers, keynote and pages not good or the same as Microsoft office?

Simple answer …. People use Microsoft office at work therefore it’s easier to use the same software at home

 

[adrianlondon]

I don't know what happened - maybe the latest version of Word, or the latest Sonoma beta - but my Intel MBA can now open Word, after a reboot, in 5 seconds (to the screen which allows me to pick a file to open).

That's about 10 seconds quicker than a week or two ago.

 

[lankox]

I don't know what happened - maybe the latest version of Word, or the latest Sonoma beta - but my Intel MBA can now open Word, after a reboot, in 5 seconds (to the screen which allows me to pick a file to open).

That's about 10 seconds quicker than a week or two ago.

Would this be Beta 3?

 

[adrianlondon]

Would this be Beta 3?

Yep, but I don't use Office much so it could have improved with an earlier beta.

 

[SnowCrocodile]

Mainly, it's about compatibility and collaboration.

Apple suite is good if you plan on always having Apple hardware, never having to open your files on non-Apple system, and never sharing it with anyone who doesn't have Apple.

Otherwise, the compatibility is horrible. I have a number of devices that I use on a daily basis - work laptop (Windows), home desktop connected to two large monitors which I use when WFH (Windows), a Linux laptop that I use as a print and media server, a MacBook, and iPad, wife's iPad, and phones. If I use an Excel spreadsheet and save it in Onedrive, I or wife or anyone I share it with can open it on any device. If I use a Numbers spreadsheet, I can only open it from Mac / iPad. Converting back and forth is far from seamless. Even LibreOffice handles Excel documents better than Numbers do.

Keynote is simply not a contender. At least in my field (engineering) I've never, ever, ever encountered anyone using anything other than Powerpoint. Same in my kids' school projects. If I have to work on any presentation for any purpose, it's Powerpoint. Period.

Word / Pages is not an issue, since I only use the very basic functionality for personal documents. For work it's another story.

Then there's an issue of functionality. Numbers has some cool functionality that I like (the ability to have different size tables on the same page). But some functionality that I take for granted in Excel and use every day is either missing (formula based conditional formatting), or is implemented in a way that feels unnecessarily labor intensive and clunky (filtering, copying format from one cell to another). And I use Excel daily at work. So it only makes sense to also use it at home and not be struggling with simple things I've learned years ago.

 

[SnowCrocodile]

To add - Numbers formulas being essentially objects rather than text slow me down a lot. I use excel instead of calculator all the time because it’s so fast and easy to quickly enter and edit a formula and to run what-if scenarios. In Numbers, it just takes longer.

But my least favorite part of Numbers is filtering. I am so used to creating complex filters on the fly with just a couple of clicks in Excel. In Numbers I have to open a side panel and define a filter, and every time I want to change the filter I have to define again. In Excel I just click on the dropdown arrow on the column header and select whatever values I want included, it takes significantly less time.

I have a personal finance tracking spreadsheet with a “Register” sheet dedicated to all of my transactions. I use Mint to sync with all of my banks and c/c accounts, then once a month export all transactions to CSV and add them to the Register. I have several levels of categories that I use for budgeting and to track spending. That includes tracking essential vs discretionary spending, and I have a couple levels for both.

I can use the years of accumulated data to track, analyze, and forecast my spending and budget any way I want. How much did we spend on cars in the last three years ? How much did we spend on a particular car ? How much of our discretionary spending we can eliminated with little impact on our QOL (Discr3) ? How much of that is related to kids ?

I tried to move it over to Numbers when I bought my Mac, because it looks so much prettier and because I like having different tables on one sheet. But I gave up after a few months, the filtering alone was just too much effort and resulted in too many saved filters.