Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?

[jlc1978]

isn't this like OneNote?

It's so much more. One Note is a not taking app, whereas Scrivener is a writing tool that happens to look like a note taking app of you look at the cork board. Scrivener, however, allows you to create documents from some or all the items on the cork board in any order you want.

This is surprising to me since I thought text is the lightest form of files, so I do not get how MS Office bugs out with 2MB file.

Word puts a whole lot of non-textual info in files, from formatting to fonts, etc.

 

[MacBH928]

Sounds to me as if you should take a very VERY serious look at either InDesign (with its book function and splendid PDF export) or Framemaker. I would never use Word for anything more complex than simple documents. Just asking for trouble and a whole lot frustration.

Or use something more barebones such as Sphinx/RestructuredText with Visual studio Code.

Anything but Word. ;-)

honest question, if Indesign can do all that MS Word can and handle bigger files, why use Word? I feel like I am missing something here.

also, whatever happened to QuarkXPress ? This used to be the king of publish IIRC

I'd be delighted to use InDesign and/or Framemaker. (Actually quite liked InDesign when it first came out and a free pre-release version was available.) Are you offering to pay for it?

My big documents are done to help people and I do not make anything from creating them.

I'm not sure I can put the effort in to get Sphinx working and then how best to use it for my purposes.

have you tried Scribus, its the linux alternative for indesign

 

[MacBH928]

And I started with Applewriter on the ][ and have gone through many iterations of word processors as well. All have pluses and minuses.

what was special about Ami Pro that every one thinks highly of? I never used it. Does it have anything to do with the current AbiWord?

The way I like to think of Scrivener's paradigm is it's the electronic equivalent of a bunch of yellow sticky notes.

You can jot down some things on one note, another on another, etc. If you know what you want the ending to be but don't know how to start, write the ending on a note. Once you have what you needs, you simply line up the stickies in order and you have your finished document. Someone needs a different note in one place, remove the one there, set it aside and put the new one in; and you still have the other text ready to go when you need it.

this is similar to "Sections" in Apple Pages isn't it?

 

[Slartibart]

I mean... look at it... something doesn't feel pleasing about it. View attachment 2396484

Still nobody ever said: "beautiful like the GUI of Microsoft Office programs" 😂🤣🤪

 

[seek3r]

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

We use O365 and the whole MS suite of apps in general at work, which integrates with sharepoint, etc

 

[seek3r]

Still nobody ever said: "beautiful like the GUI of Microsoft Office programs" 😂🤣🤪

FWIW the mac versions used to actually have better UIs than the windows versions thanks to Microsoft's MacBU, which they closed not all that long ago sadly

 

[polyphenol]

This is surprising to me since I thought text is the lightest form of files, so I do not get how MS Office bugs out with 2MB file.

Add in a pile of tables. Quite a number of styles. Lots of internal links. Table of Contents. Some "foreign" fonts - literally Cyrillic, Greek, and a few others. Quite a number of languages. A sprinkling of emoji.

Also switching between macOS and Windows. Which I have to do because exporting a PDF on macOS does not produce a working ToC in the PDF.

And that also needed a number of images being used to replace emoji that don't work under Windows.

The actual text content is modest!

 

[VitoBotta]

I don't know if it has been mentioned already (27 pages!) but I recommend OnlyOffice as a simple but good alternative to MS Office with very good compatibility with the MS Office formats. I like that I can also connect it to my Nextcloud instance and collaborate in real time with others.

 

[polyphenol]

if Indesign can do all that MS Word can and handle bigger files, why use Word?

Two reasons, InDesign is prohibitively expensive for my purposes.

And InDesign lays out very well but often not the best for the process of typing. Though I haven't used it in a long time so it might have changed.

It was quite usual to write parts (say, chapters) in Word and place those documents within InDesign.

 

[jfreedle2]

Someone who is doing serious work with LaTex is likely to use it for the entire document rather than cobble together Latex with any word processor and risk not having it look "just right."



Which, while likely true as MS is in the business of making money, is irrelevant Office's usefulness on the Mac.



And I started with Applewriter on the ][ and have gone through many iterations of word processors as well. All have pluses and minuses.



Really? You must be joking. Sure you can do a video conference call but that's about it.

You can't even initiate a FaceTime call from a non-Apple device, setup the meeting and invite attendees, etc., let alone share a screen and have all attendees work on the same spreadsheet at the same time and see everyone's edits in real time.



Unfortunately, that one thing done well leaves out key things some people need to get work done. Apple hasn't really been interested in the business software market and basically ceded it to MS.



No one is trying to sell you on anything. You have a solution that works for you, which is great, but doesn't for many people.

It's tool, and you should use what is appropriate for the job at hand.



And they choose what gets the job done, and not just Office. Scrivener is a much better tool for writing than iWorks or Office, for example. The original questions was about why do people use Office, and tehre have been a lot pf valid reasons why it is the preferred choice, even if it is not yours.



Sometimes, but that doesn't mean the competing product is a better choice, or worse choice, just another choice; and even some of the simple functionality, such as macros, are not readily available in iWorks or some of the competing products. Or changing the color of an object based on a cell value.

iWorks does a number of things well and is quite suitable for a lot of users, but there are plenty of use cases where it doesn't and that's one reason it isn't a viable Office replacement for many users.


And plenty of others have.

But you never answered the question:

What functionality does iWorks offer on the iPad that MS Office doesn't?


Have you tried Scrivener? It might be a good affordable solution, especially since it makes it easy to create various versions as you describe.

No I have not tried Scivener and I am not going to. You can do screen sharing on FaceTime as well, the only limitation is when one person is on Windows or Android, which is not really a problem for me. From understanding the psychology of the decisions that people make I understand what I have already stated. There are very few people that would look past what they have been taught, because it is just easier to keep doing the same thing rather than looking at other tools. I also used Apple Writer on the Apple ][ as well, WordPerfect in OS/2, Windows, and DOS as well. There may be a few use cases where iWork is not a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office, but I would give that number a less than 10 count. I only answer to one aspect (off the top of my head) and there are many others. The second most important point is that Microsoft Office requires a subscription. I was forced to look for alternatives when I upgraded my notebook computer to the iPad twelve years ago, and I tried iWork as a replacement and never needed to look elsewhere. Another functionality that iWork provides that Office does not is Page Layout options. The only value that a Microsoft 365 subscription provides is 1 TB of storage and you get Microsoft Office for free. As I stated before, people can easily find justifications based on their usage to continue to use Microsoft Office, and that does not make it a valid point, just their opinion. Microsoft Office is just not worth the cost. As I originally stated, because someone else uses Microsoft Office is NEVER a reason to spend money on Microsoft Office. There was an article online somewhere that actually outlined this very point, and I cannot currently find it.

 

[Tagbert]

Word does struggle on big documents.

I have a document which is about 520 pages and am always expecting it to fail. Which it has done numerous times. It isn't that big, about 2 megabytes. I had to move some content out to separate documents but need to continue doing that.

I could easily keep things in several separate documents except:

I want a Table of Contents for the whole work;
I want consistency of styles;
I want to export the whole thing to a single PDF;
It would be great to be able to export a PDF of either the whole document for just section 1, 2 or 3 with only the relevant part of the ToC. (Imagine a UK-only, Europe-only and Rest of World sections - or all in one.)

The old master document feature of Word was a disaster zone.

Could probably do what I need in Tex... I've got a version installed and used it for some things. But it is not easy to learn!

That scenario is exactly what Scrivener is made for.

 

[jlc1978]

No I have not tried Scivener and I am not going to.

Which, if you look at who I was responding to, you'd realize it was not meant for you; it was for someone looking for a way to lay out large documents. Scrivener is a great tool for that because of the way it approaches writing and document creation. Nothing I have seen can touch it, especially for its price.

You can do screen sharing on FaceTime as well, the only limitation is when one person is on Windows or Android, which is not really a problem for me.

Which, however is a problem for probably 99% of the rest of the world; where mixed Apple/Android/Windows/MacOS is the norm.

There may be a few use cases where iWork is not a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office, but I would give that number a less than 10 count. I only answer to one aspect (off the top of my head) and there are many others. The second most important point is that Microsoft Office requires a subscription. I was forced to look for alternatives when I upgraded my notebook computer to the iPad twelve years ago, and I tried iWork as a replacement and never needed to look elsewhere.

It's great it works for you, but for many people iWorks lacks key functionality and thus is not a suitable tool. They need to use what works for their use case, and there are many beyond 10 that fit that description.

Another functionality that iWork provides that Office does not is Page Layout options.

Well, I've laid out professional newsletters and posters in Word with no problems, so you are mistaken that it does not offer page layout options.

As I stated before, people can easily find justifications based on their usage to continue to use Microsoft Office, and that does not make it a valid point, just their opinion. Microsoft Office is just not worth the cost.

Which, is of course, just your opinion. I've given you examples of where Office provides functionality that Apple's products do not.

As I originally stated, because someone else uses Microsoft Office is NEVER a reason to spend money on Microsoft Office.

When they are a paying client and you need to develop solutions for them that, you most certainly do. "Sorry, iWorks can't do that" just won't cut it in a business environment; and Office rules there.

YMMV HAND

 

[seek3r]

No I have not tried Scivener and I am not going to. You can do screen sharing on FaceTime as well, the only limitation is when one person is on Windows or Android, which is not really a problem for me. From understanding the psychology of the decisions that people make I understand what I have already stated. There are very few people that would look past what they have been taught, because it is just easier to keep doing the same thing rather than looking at other tools. I also used Apple Writer on the Apple ][ as well, WordPerfect in OS/2, Windows, and DOS as well. There may be a few use cases where iWork is not a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office, but I would give that number a less than 10 count. I only answer to one aspect (off the top of my head) and there are many others. The second most important point is that Microsoft Office requires a subscription. I was forced to look for alternatives when I upgraded my notebook computer to the iPad twelve years ago, and I tried iWork as a replacement and never needed to look elsewhere. Another functionality that iWork provides that Office does not is Page Layout options. The only value that a Microsoft 365 subscription provides is 1 TB of storage and you get Microsoft Office for free. As I stated before, people can easily find justifications based on their usage to continue to use Microsoft Office, and that does not make it a valid point, just their opinion. Microsoft Office is just not worth the cost. As I originally stated, because someone else uses Microsoft Office is NEVER a reason to spend money on Microsoft Office. There was an article online somewhere that actually outlined this very point, and I cannot currently find it.

Yeah… no. you dont actually work in a corporate environment, do you?

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

wait, does "save as" save a version of the document WITHIN the document or produces a new document? on macos it produces a new document.

...

Save As produces a new document on Windows and MacOS.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

This is surprising to me since I thought text is the lightest form of files, so I do not get how MS Office bugs out with 2MB file.

While a word processor (Word, LibreOffice Writer, Pages, etc, etc, etc) creates a "Text Document" it is not saved as plain ASCII text. It is saved in a binary format which can be much larger than just the plain text.

When you make an edit, Word puts the edited text at the end of the document, with a pointer from the original text to the new text. After a while you get hundreds of pointers from the old text to the new text, then from the new text to the original place. When you open or print the document, Word is going back and forth so the document looks like what it should. After a while, it gets so complicated that Word just gives up, and your document is irretrievably corrupted.

The only way to prevent this is to do a Save As, which then writes the old document out in order to give you a new, clean document, without pointers. You might actually see that the new document is smaller than the original.

 

[seek3r]

While a word processor (Word, LibreOffice Writer, Pages, etc, etc, etc) creates a "Text Document" it is not saved as plain ASCII text. It is saved in a binary format which can be much larger than just the plain text.

When you make an edit, Word puts the edited text at the end of the document, with a pointer from the original text to the new text. After a while you get hundreds of pointers from the old text to the new text, then from the new text to the original place. When you open or print the document, Word is going back and forth so the document looks like what it should. After a while, it gets so complicated that Word just gives up, and your document is irretrievably corrupted.

The only way to prevent this is to do a Save As, which then writes the old document out in order to give you a new, clean document, without pointers. You might actually see that the new document is smaller than the original.

I have shared documents thousands of pages long with edit histories from hundreds of people over several years that arent irretrievably corrupted, what are you doing?

 

[leifp]

wait, does "save as" save a version of the document WITHIN the document or produces a new document? on macos it produces a new document.




isn't this like OneNote?



even myself, I rather use something that I know how to get things done with rather than learn something new. As a photoshop user I was unable to use GIMP.

Scrivener is like Word + OneNote + InDesign. It’s not quite as good as Word for word processing and not nearly as functional for page layout as InDesign but it’s definitely superior to OneNote. It’s a one stop shop in manuscript management and it supports a much more functional design than MS products let alone something as complex/dedicated as InDesign.

There are competitors to Scrivener, but I’ve been using it on and off since it was released (+/-) and see no reason to jump ship - I’m not missing anything in Scrivener 3 for macOS and it’s available on iPadOS as well. That does not mean others don’t prefer other software nor that they’re wrong…

 

[bzgnyc2]

great post! I am surprised about excel since I heard that excel main purpose is to handle large data. I wonder how large the data is for corporates like Amazon or Apple.

Excel was designed around the spreadsheet concept which is an anachronism from pre-computer accounting. It works okay for things that fit on one screen like say an income statement but it's really not good for statistical analysis, large datasets, etc.

There's two tedious things about the classic spreadsheet model: 1) it's cell-driven rather than variables/arrays/vectors/matrix/etc such that every cell can be a different formula/format/etc. 2) formulas are intertwined with the data which can make reusing models or applying alternate models to existing data manual and error-prone. It also gets slow with millions of data points.

On the flip side one nice thing about Excel is that changes are (usually) instant. So if you update a cell/variable (or formula) it propogates throught the spreadsheet almost instantly.

Microsoft has expanded the tool with tables, arrays, etc, but generally I don't see it used for "big data". Putting aside even newer analytics models, I generally see combinations of databases, Python/R, and BI/visualization tools (Tableau, PowerBI, etc).

Google docs is way less capable than office as far as I know. Even less than Apple Pages.

Yes I would generally say Google Docs are less functional than their MS Office equivalents within their category. However, most people don't use all those features while shared documents/collaboration is inherent with it's model. Plus it's an easy extension of the Google ecosystem, which like it or not is native to Gen Z/A. They've already made peace with Google mining their data.

 

[Sciuriware]

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

1) computer users are conservative ("what I have is good enough"),
2) ever heard of the Tower Of Babel? How many architectures, OS's, Programming Languages, Tools ........
3) although Office was invented at Xerox (!) it was really pushed by MS; marketing or the sort is crucial.
4) ever been on holidays: tourists want to eat, sleep and play like at home; where ever they are.
And so on. It is sometimes called 'diversity' and it seems to be 'natural'.
;JOOP!

 

[bzgnyc2]

This is surprising to me since I thought text is the lightest form of files, so I do not get how MS Office bugs out with 2MB file.

if you are ever curious what's in a particular Office "x" file (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc) particular, it's actually not hard to deconstruct. All those files are specially Zip'd structures of XML files (with their own XML schema).

If you work from the command line, just do "unzip MyDocument.docx" and it will extract a bunch of XML files into the current directory. Alternatively, you can rename MyDocument.docx to "MyDocument.zip" and then double click on the Zip file and Apple's builtin Archive Utility will extract it's contents. Of course make sure you don't do this with anything important. Depending on settings/how invoked, Archive Utility tends to move the .Zip file (and hence the Office document under examination) to the Trash.

Then without resorting to octal file dumpers or whatnot you can see all that Office is storing in your document in the very verbose XML format. With my not too-out-of-date version of O365, a completely blank Word document is about 11K. But it is actually 50K of XML files when unzip'd. Likely your 2MB Word file is far more than 2MB of XML, of which your text is a just a fraction, but it's bloatyness is hidden via the Zip compression.

Likewise if you do this on the Excel side, it's almost painful to see how inefficiently it stores a typical table of data. Excel is really like fancy graph paper in the age of AR/VR.

The upside however to these Office formats is that it is text/XML (after reversing the well-documented Zip compression/archive). Relative to true binary formats, this should give an edge to future software trying to import it and perhaps historians trying to sift through all our stuff a few hundred years from now.

 

[MacBH928]

And I started with Applewriter on the ][ and have gone through many iterations of word processors as well. All have pluses and minuses.

what was special about Ami Pro that every one thinks highly of? I never used it. Does it have anything to do with the current AbiWord?

The way I like to think of Scrivener's paradigm is it's the electronic equivalent of a bunch of yellow sticky notes.

You can jot down some things on one note, another on another, etc. If you know what you want the ending to be but don't know how to start, write the ending on a note. Once you have what you needs, you simply line up the stickies in order and you have your finished document. Someone needs a different note in one place, remove the one there, set it aside and put the new one in; and you still have the other text ready to go when you need it.

this is similar to "Sections" in Apple Pages isn't it?

 

[MacBH928]

When you make an edit, Word puts the edited text at the end of the document, with a pointer from the original text to the new text.

wait..are you saying the original text you delete never gets deleted it just points to a new version of the text?

if you are ever curious what's in a particular Office "x" file (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc) particular, it's actually not hard to deconstruct. All those files are specially Zip'd structures of XML files (with their own XML schema).

If you work from the command line, just do "unzip MyDocument.docx" and it will extract a bunch of XML files into the current directory. Alternatively, you can rename MyDocument.docx to "MyDocument.zip" and then double click on the Zip file and Apple's builtin Archive Utility will extract it's contents. Of course make sure you don't do this with anything important. Depending on settings/how invoked, Archive Utility tends to move the .Zip file (and hence the Office document under examination) to the Trash.

Then without resorting to octal file dumpers or whatnot you can see all that Office is storing in your document in the very verbose XML format. With my not too-out-of-date version of O365, a completely blank Word document is about 11K. But it is actually 50K of XML files when unzip'd. Likely your 2MB Word file is far more than 2MB of XML, of which your text is a just a fraction, but it's bloatyness is hidden via the Zip compression.

Likewise if you do this on the Excel side, it's almost painful to see how inefficiently it stores a typical table of data. Excel is really like fancy graph paper in the age of AR/VR.

The upside however to these Office formats is that it is text/XML (after reversing the well-documented Zip compression/archive). Relative to true binary formats, this should give an edge to future software trying to import it and perhaps historians trying to sift through all our stuff a few hundred years from now.

I just tried this, macos couldn't unzip it bu The Unarchiver did.

Sheesh, the unzipped file is like 6x the .docx file and the XML is a hot mess. I can see how it can get corrupted now.

 

[polyphenol]

On the flip side one nice thing about Excel is that changes are (usually) instant. So if you update a cell/variable (or formula) it propogates throught the spreadsheet almost instantly.

My first spreadsheet was (I'm fairly sure) on Lotus 1-2-3! But I am absolutely certain it was incredibly far from instant. Wasn't that complicated but it did do some lookups - and took around 20 minutes to recalculate. That was on a typical for the time office PC.

Years later, I fell across a copy of it. Pretty sure I must have imported it into Excel. Recalculation so fast it was indistinguishable from "instant". The days when changes were dramatic.

 

[jlc1978]

what was special about Ami Pro that every one thinks highly of? I never used it. Does it have anything to do with the current AbiWord?

Never heard of it.

this is similar to "Sections" in Apple Pages isn't it?

Somewhat but much more useful.

 

[bzgnyc2]

wait..are you saying the original text you delete never gets deleted it just points to a new version of the text?

You wrote that in response to someone else but just wanted to add that Word's Undo can go back pretty far. However, as far as I know it doesn't go back to prior sessions (as in if you save then close and then reopen, it can't get you back to before you saved). That said, I wouldn't test this by writing "My Boss is a jerk" in a version and then erasing and hoping he or she never sees it...

My impression is that text you delete from a file usualy doesn't get saved with the file. But sometimes things/objects remain linked to things that are retained and then Office continues to save those orphaned objects in the file. In which case they will probably get carried along in the XML for the life of the document even if you can't see it normally. Don't quote or cite me on that -- I am by no means a Word file format expert.

If you want to know for sure whether old text is is getting carried into a particular file, I would verify with the unzip method. Taking an existing document, deleting everything, and then saving and then comparing with a newly created blank document, the erased document was still twice the size of the blank document. However, I didn't see any remnants of the original document in it.

I just tried this, macos couldn't unzip it bu The Unarchiver did.

Sheesh, the unzipped file is like 6x the .docx file and the XML is a hot mess. I can see how it can get corrupted now.

And my memory is that the XML of an .xlsx file is even worse...to the point you wonder how it doesn't get corrupted everytime...