Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

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

...

Not until you do a "Save As", when the document is written out in order, with all the new text in their proper place and the original, amended, text is removed.

 

[jfreedle2]

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.



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



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.



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.



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



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

Not 99% of the rest of the world, since the worldwide marketshare for Windows desktop is only at 75%, and Android is around 60% (mostly outside of the United States). I do not believe that Scrivener is worth the cost. You are actually making my point that people should not be forced to use a particular set of tools. I have chosen the best tools that provides the functionality that I require. Microsoft Office is bloated with unnecessary functionality that ≤2% of people actually use. Microsoft Office is great for those ≤2% that actually use the additional functionality, but for the >98& of people that do not, it is a waste of space and money. Just because you can jury-rig Microsoft Word into doing something that was not designed to do, does not mean that it was designed to perform a specific function. Microsoft Word is purely a word processor and nothing more. You have your opinion and you will make your decisions based on that. The reality is the >98% of people will not use the additional functionality from Microsoft Office and therefore do not need Microsoft Office.

 

[monokakata]

What does Scrivener do for long writing that MS or Libre can not do ?

Scrivener has organizational tools that far exceed anything Word has. I couldn't live without them (and I work in long-form prose, hundreds of pages). With Scrivener, for example, you can rearrange sections (for example, chapters) by simply dragging them around (of course you have to have set up your project in that way, but it's very easy).

The "Binder" is your repository for not just your draft, but your notes, things you may have imported...whatever. So for example, let's say you have a set of notes about what you want to have happen in a chapter. Using the two-pane display, you can be looking at your notes in one pane, and composing in the other. Yes, in Word you could have a doc with the notes and a doc with the chapter and get them both on the screen...but that's a giant headache compared to the way it can be done in Scrivener.

And it can do things that Word simply cannot do. I'm working on something that has two first-person narrators, who alternate over more than 50 chapters. From time to time I check to see if each narrator's voice is consistent across all the chapters that voice narrates. I've added a symbol to each narrator's name in the chapter titles, and that combo (for example, "*June") never appears in the text body, and I can tell Scrivener to search for it. Scrivener will only find it in the chapter titles, so it assembles all the chapters headed by *June as if they were a single document, and I can read through it (and edit) as such. Then when it's time to export to Word and send the thing around, it's easy to get rid of the symbol.

 

[MacBH928]

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...

its amazing how the computer can make sense of it in an instant.

 

[MacBH928]

Not until you do a "Save As", when the document is written out in order, with all the new text in their proper place and the original, amended, text is removed.

Thanks, I will be using this tip in the future!

The reality is the >98% of people will not use the additional functionality from Microsoft Office and therefore do not need Microsoft Office.

You are right but they use it for cross compatibility and sharing with others, which is a point made already many times. For example, a lawyer sent me a contract in .DOCX and not even Word online was apple to format it correctly so I had to get MS Office.

TBF, I later checked it and LibreOffice +Apple Pages opened it fairly well. Maybe they did some update or something.

Scrivener has organizational tools that far exceed anything Word has. I couldn't live without them (and I work in long-form prose, hundreds of pages). With Scrivener, for example, you can rearrange sections (for example, chapters) by simply dragging them around (of course you have to have set up your project in that way, but it's very easy).

The "Binder" is your repository for not just your draft, but your notes, things you may have imported...whatever. So for example, let's say you have a set of notes about what you want to have happen in a chapter. Using the two-pane display, you can be looking at your notes in one pane, and composing in the other. Yes, in Word you could have a doc with the notes and a doc with the chapter and get them both on the screen...but that's a giant headache compared to the way it can be done in Scrivener.

And it can do things that Word simply cannot do. I'm working on something that has two first-person narrators, who alternate over more than 50 chapters. From time to time I check to see if each narrator's voice is consistent across all the chapters that voice narrates. I've added a symbol to each narrator's name in the chapter titles, and that combo (for example, "*June") never appears in the text body, and I can tell Scrivener to search for it. Scrivener will only find it in the chapter titles, so it assembles all the chapters headed by *June as if they were a single document, and I can read through it (and edit) as such. Then when it's time to export to Word and send the thing around, it's easy to get rid of the symbol.

thanks. May I ask why you need to export to Word? I heard PDF is the favorite format for printing.

 

[jlc1978]

TBF, I later checked it and LibreOffice +Apple Pages opened it fairly well. Maybe they did some update or something.

Yea, there really isn’t one truly 100% compatible tool out there where you can always be assured the document will look the same no matter what OS or wp is used to open it. Even Office isn’t 100% so I always check critical or complex docs before sending, or simply use Word in my VM.

 

[Cheffy Dave]

For me, MS Office is a necessary "evil". When I need to work on files that others have sent me in MS Office format, or I need to send documents to others in MS Office format, there is no substitute for MS Office itself.

When I have a choice, i use Apples "iWork" suite. I am more productive and creative with those than when I'm using other suites.

I still use LibreOffice, but not as much as I did in the past... primarily because it's MS Office compatibility has taken a few steps backwards recently.

As I have time to tinker and explore, I've been making more use of Google's suite. The apps work great and are deceptively powerful (they look basic on the surface, but by thinking differently, I've been able to produce some pretty advanced documents). I like that it is extremely cross-platform.

Next to working in iWork on my iMac, using the Google suite on my Pixelbook, is my favorite working environment.

Still lovin that Avatar!

 

[monokakata]

thanks. May I ask why you need to export to Word? I heard PDF is the favorite format for printing.

Export to Word is necessary because every magazine/journal/publisher that accepts manuscripts requires that they be in Word (for creative writing, anyway). Nobody would ever send a Scrivener project to anybody other than a collaborator. That's not what it's meant to do.

So yeah. Wrap up that novel or memoir or book of poems in Scrivener, export it to a Word doc (or perhaps a PDF) and start sending it around.

Maybe I'm being unclear. I'm not anti-Word at all. I use Word (and Excel) all the time, usually every day, because I have things sent to me and send things out. But when I'm creating something -- unless it's a one or two-pager -- I use Scrivener.

 

[Tagbert]

Not 99% of the rest of the world, since the worldwide marketshare for Windows desktop is only at 75%, and Android is around 60% (mostly outside of the United States). I do not believe that Scrivener is worth the cost. You are actually making my point that people should not be forced to use a particular set of tools. I have chosen the best tools that provides the functionality that I require. Microsoft Office is bloated with unnecessary functionality that ≤2% of people actually use. Microsoft Office is great for those ≤2% that actually use the additional functionality, but for the >98& of people that do not, it is a waste of space and money. Just because you can jury-rig Microsoft Word into doing something that was not designed to do, does not mean that it was designed to perform a specific function. Microsoft Word is purely a word processor and nothing more. You have your opinion and you will make your decisions based on that. The reality is the >98% of people will not use the additional functionality from Microsoft Office and therefore do not need Microsoft Office.

98% of users can use pretty much any word processor because their needs are handled by any of the programs, including Word. It's the 2% that need all kinds of different things that will need to try different programs to see which one meets their needs.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

In a deliberate attempt to completely derail this thread I would like to posit that some might like to investigate the use of Markdown to write documents.
You can use a smart editor like Typora, Obsidian, Zettlr or many others, the text is saved in ultra-safe plain-text ASCII, and you can export via Pandoc to Word, LibreOffice, PDF or, for the masochistic, LaTeX.
Your documents are cross-platform across Mac, Windows and Linux.
If you use Obsidian, you can import the Editing Toolbar to give you "a MS Word-like toolbar editing experience".

 

[splifingate]

Microsoft Office is bloated with unnecessary functionality that ≤2% of people actually use. Microsoft Office is great for those ≤2% that actually use the additional functionality, but for the >98& of people that do not, it is a waste of space and money.

This.

On those rare occasions where I need to use part of the ≤2%, I continue to become increasingly-frustrated with just how difficult that process has become 🤷‍♂️

 

[throAU]

Microsoft Office is bloated with unnecessary functionality that ≤2% of people actually use. Microsoft Office is great for those ≤2% that actually use the additional functionality, but for the >98& of people that do not, it is a waste of space and money.

Here's the thing.

You need to be compatible with the business world, and there's a significant percentage of users who work for anything larger than a family business that need to integrate between say, MS excel and SQL server or MS Excel and a suite of third party line of business apps that assume you have MS office installed.

Some users are captive due to the above. Others are in turn captive to be compatible with the above and/or run the same software across the enterprise rather than 2 or 3 different productivity suites.

There's no way - as an IT professional - that I want to maintain automated installers and updaters for multiple office suites when the chances are all our users are licensed for MS 365 E3 or E5 anyway. Never mind the multiple support issues the helpdesk would need to deal with getting users to identify their office suite when reporting issues, never mind maintaining an internal knowledge base to fix N different problem sets for N different productivity suites.

 

[polyphenol]

Microsoft Office is bloated with unnecessary functionality that ≤2% of people actually use.

It would have been interesting to have seen the results had Microsoft released a genuinely Word-compatible but simplified word processor - instead of Write and Works.

That is, the simplified version would have had its features limited. (Arguable that it should have been able to display some or all of the fancier things in some sort of display-only view.)

At one point, many years ago, I used a non-Microsoft Word-compatible word processor like that. Perhaps oddly, it could nevertheless do things Word couldn't. One example (the only thing I remember) is that spacing after a paragraph could be set negative. And, for some reason, that enabled me to achieve an effect that I could not achieve within Word. (Someone else might have been able to, but however hard I tried, I couldn't.)

 

[jlc1978]

Export to Word is necessary because every magazine/journal/publisher that accepts manuscripts requires that they be in Word (for creative writing, anyway). Nobody would ever send a Scrivener project to anybody other than a collaborator. That's not what it's meant to do.

So yeah. Wrap up that novel or memoir or book of poems in Scrivener, export it to a Word doc (or perhaps a PDF) and start sending it around.

Maybe I'm being unclear. I'm not anti-Word at all. I use Word (and Excel) all the time, usually every day, because I have things sent to me and send things out. But when I'm creating something -- unless it's a one or two-pager -- I use Scrivener.

That pretty much encapsulates how Scrivener and Word complement each other; and why you pick the tool that best does teh job at hand.

You need to be compatible with the business world, and there's a significant percentage of users who work for anything larger than a family business that need to integrate between say, MS excel and SQL server or MS Excel and a suite of third party line of business apps that assume you have MS office installed.

And even if the user isn't aware they are using some of those features they are still using them, they just see the results. Even something as simple as a macro that runs on file opening would break and teh user have no idea why.

Never mind the multiple support issues the helpdesk would need to deal with getting users to identify their office suite when reporting issues, never mind maintaining an internal knowledge base to fix N different problem sets for N different productivity suites.

You mean you don't want to get "Why isn't this working calls" because something was created in X a date user is using Y? Where's your sense of adventure?

 

[MacBH928]

98% of users can use pretty much any word processor because their needs are handled by any of the programs, including Word. It's the 2% that need all kinds of different things that will need to try different programs to see which one meets their needs.

You are correct and its amazing how many there are out there, and not sure why people use so many or why they continue to exist. Here is a list of some of the lesser known ones:

WordPerfect, Bean, Abi Word, Nisus, WPS Office, Zoho writer, Collabora, Free Office, Adobe Framemaker

In a deliberate attempt to completely derail this thread I would like to posit that some might like to investigate the use of Markdown to write documents.
You can use a smart editor like Typora, Obsidian, Zettlr or many others, the text is saved in ultra-safe plain-text ASCII, and you can export via Pandoc to Word, LibreOffice, PDF or, for the masochistic, LaTeX.
Your documents are cross-platform across Mac, Windows and Linux.
If you use Obsidian, you can import the Editing Toolbar to give you "a MS Word-like toolbar editing experience".

I am afraid thats not enough as this keeps formatting of the text but you need formatting of the document. line spaces, tabs indents , sometimes placement of image but its great for personal notes and doesn't restrict you to a file format or app

 

[Yebubbleman]

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

Keynote blows PowerPoint away.

Pages is...on par with Word for 85-95% of use cases (Word still has more features, but Pages will suffice [although, ironically, it's terrible at handling .docx files in such a way that they then function fine in Word]); I might consider Google Docs over Pages if what I want is a Microsoft Word alternative.

Numbers is a joke. Perfectly fine for extremely casual lists and spreadsheets, but don't consider it a Microsoft Excel replacement because it really isn't. Google Sheets is much better, but even it doesn't hold a candle to Excel in some contexts. Excel is truly king. Then again, hardcore Excel power users will tell you that Excel for Mac is inferior to Excel for Windows.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

...

I am afraid thats not enough as this keeps formatting of the text but you need formatting of the document. line spaces, tabs indents , sometimes placement of image but its great for personal notes and doesn't restrict you to a file format or app

you can export via Pandoc to Word, LibreOffice, PDF or, for the masochistic, LaTeX.

When you export via Pandoc, you get all that formatting.

Markdown is the writing tool. Pandoc is the formatting tool.

Word is lousy at both.

 

[jlc1978]

When you export via Pandoc, you get all that formatting.

Markdown is the writing tool. Pandoc is the formatting tool.

Word is lousy at both.

Which is true, but here is the challenge:

Unless they can work seamlessly and not require templates, tweaking results to get wha the user wants, etc. and not require the user to understand how and what is happening, the average user won't want them. The average user wants tools that work with as little effort as possible; and aren't techies for whom using tools that aren't what others may use is part of the fun and enjoy the challenge of making stuff work.

And the tech support staff doesn't want to spend all day fixing issues that arise because people are using multiple tools hen they could use one that works; even if that tool is not perfect.

 

[adib]

It would have been interesting to have seen the results had Microsoft released a genuinely Word-compatible but simplified word processor - instead of Write and Works.

It does.

1. Microsoft 365 Mobile (Android and iOS)
2. Microsoft Word Mobile (Android and iOS)
3. Microsoft Office Web.

All those are "simplified" than the Windows and macOS versions — serious users would know some of the missing features.

In terms of feature-set the order of feature completeness of Microsoft Office apps would be:

1. Windows
2. macOS
3. iOS
4. Android
5. Web.

 

[throAU]

Keynote blows PowerPoint away.

QFT

I don't do a lot of powerpoint, but managed to get a few decent presentations up and running in keynote in minutes.

Powerpoint? It's way, way clunkier to use.

Keynote is a killer app for the Mac, and you can totally tell that Steve Jobs had a lot of input into and used it on stage, because it does what it does with a minimum of hassle.

 

[throAU]

Then again, hardcore Excel power users will tell you that Excel for Mac is inferior to Excel for Windows.

You don't even really need to be that hardcore. Mac Excel performance is pretty trash. I'm not sure why - and for most casual small-time office user use it still kills numbers for functionality, but its a pale imitation of the windows version as far as performance goes.

And yeah numbers is clearly aimed at home user, small business things. It has some nice built in templates for people who don't use and live in spreadsheets very often.

It's not an enterprise spreadsheet and that's OK - it's easy to use for basic things. So long as you don't try and use it for "real" business accounting things - because then it really falls apart.

 

[MacBH928]

When you export via Pandoc, you get all that formatting.

Markdown is the writing tool. Pandoc is the formatting tool.

Word is lousy at both.

Maybe there is a miscommunication. I meant Markdown will not let you insert text in specific layouts such as the document below.

Numbers is a joke. Perfectly fine for extremely casual lists and spreadsheets, but don't consider it a Microsoft Excel replacement because it really isn't. Google Sheets is much better.

I wouldn't go that far. I found Numbers is great, capable, and intuitive but it has not been made for corporate use. I keep wondering why Apple maintain it since the targeted customer of "home spread sheet user +apple user+ has no Excel" is pretty niche. They exist, I am one of them but not sure if its enough to justify maintaining it.

then again, maybe I am wrong. On the app store its 110,000 "5 star" rating. One of the biggest caveat on Apple suite is there is hardly any resources online to teach you how to use it, meanwhile MS office has plethora in all media formats.

Why would you say Google Sheets is much better than Numbers? I doubt a browser app is better than a native app.

The average user wants tools that work with as little effort as possible;

Steve Jobs understood this very well.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I wouldn't go that far. I found Numbers is great, capable, and intuitive but it has not been made for corporate use.

"great, capable, and intuitive" is highly subjective. I'm not saying it won't serve your needs. I'm saying that it completely pales in comparison to what's out there and isn't even close to comparing to Google Sheets or Excel.

I keep wondering why Apple maintain it since the targeted customer of "home spread sheet user +apple user+ has no Excel" is pretty niche. They exist, I am one of them but not sure if its enough to justify maintaining it.

I agree and wonder the same. I don't know what all they've added to Numbers lately, but if Apple was really trying to provide a serious alternative to Excel or Sheets, they've...really not put in the required effort to do so.

then again, maybe I am wrong. On the app store its 110,000 "5 star" rating. One of the biggest caveat on Apple suite is there is hardly any resources online to teach you how to use it, meanwhile MS office has plethora in all media formats.

There are a bunch of books out there for the various iWork apps. Apple also has free user guides in the Apple Books store. Although, to your point, the availability for such resources for these iWork apps still pales in comparison to what one can find for any given version of Excel.

Why would you say Google Sheets is much better than Numbers? I doubt a browser app is better than a native app.

Have you used Google Sheets? It's pretty full-featured. I'm sure an Excel expert will find plenty of features that it's lacking, but it's WAY more feature-rich than Excel. Like, it's at least in the same ballpark. Same is true of Google Docs in relation to Microsoft Word. The fact that it's browser-based means nothing; it's still plenty powerful.

 

[jfreedle2]

Here's the thing.

You need to be compatible with the business world, and there's a significant percentage of users who work for anything larger than a family business that need to integrate between say, MS excel and SQL server or MS Excel and a suite of third party line of business apps that assume you have MS office installed.

Some users are captive due to the above. Others are in turn captive to be compatible with the above and/or run the same software across the enterprise rather than 2 or 3 different productivity suites.

There's no way - as an IT professional - that I want to maintain automated installers and updaters for multiple office suites when the chances are all our users are licensed for MS 365 E3 or E5 anyway. Never mind the multiple support issues the helpdesk would need to deal with getting users to identify their office suite when reporting issues, never mind maintaining an internal knowledge base to fix N different problem sets for N different productivity suites.

This is why many businesses are downgrading to web sites instead of real software.

 

[jfreedle2]

You don't even really need to be that hardcore. Mac Excel performance is pretty trash. I'm not sure why - and for most casual small-time office user use it still kills numbers for functionality, but its a pale imitation of the windows version as far as performance goes.

And yeah numbers is clearly aimed at home user, small business things. It has some nice built in templates for people who don't use and live in spreadsheets very often.

It's not an enterprise spreadsheet and that's OK - it's easy to use for basic things. So long as you don't try and use it for "real" business accounting things - because then it really falls apart.

Where Numbers blows away Excel away is data management and tables. The tables on the sheets do not have to line up. Excel‘s design is tired and dated. As far as Excel for Windows having more functionality than Excel for Macintosh is because Microsoft develops primarily for Windows and in their spare time they might release features for Excel for Macintosh. Of course Microsoft is going to move all of the functionality to their Microsoft 365 cloud and the local applications will simply be terminals to the Microsoft 365 backend with no local functionality.
Numbers does have some pretty good functionality, I find the Pivot table functionality better than Microsoft Excel’s. Sorting and filtering I find much better than Microsoft Excel’s, probably because might store the data in SQLite tables whereas Excel probably deals with the inefficient XML.