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Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?
- Thread starter Benz63amg
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here as well. I had to install VMware/Windows 11 on my M1 as the UI is hard to beat.
Since I don't know anyone who uses the "free" Apple products as opposed to the paid Microsoft ones asking for evidence to support your statement.
I started using macOS on an M1 mini as soon as a few refurbs became available. I had been using, and still do sometimes use, a Windows 10 machine.
I've used Word since Word II! So am pretty familiar with it. But for some things I was doing, it was causing lots of issues.
Switching to macOS version of Office helped some things - but hindered others. Stupid things like exporting PDFs with functional Tables of Contents and all characters appearing properly.
And I was finding issues with some characters appearing differently across macOS/Word/PDF and Windows/Word/PDF.
And a couple of my larger documents were incredibly slow to load, save, export to PDF - on either platform.
Have now converted some wholesale to Pages. And find it a much happier experience.
My main advantage which permitted the change is that my output is just PDFs. No-one else needs to edit the files so I can use anything that works.
It takes some effort to learn Pages. I'd like to see some changes. But I can open a file, make some changes, save and export to PDF, and close it, faster than just opening the old Windows/Word version. Speed isn't everything but thumb twiddling is tedious.
I've used Word since Word II! So am pretty familiar with it. But for some things I was doing, it was causing lots of issues.
Switching to macOS version of Office helped some things - but hindered others. Stupid things like exporting PDFs with functional Tables of Contents and all characters appearing properly.
And I was finding issues with some characters appearing differently across macOS/Word/PDF and Windows/Word/PDF.
And a couple of my larger documents were incredibly slow to load, save, export to PDF - on either platform.
Have now converted some wholesale to Pages. And find it a much happier experience.
My main advantage which permitted the change is that my output is just PDFs. No-one else needs to edit the files so I can use anything that works.
It takes some effort to learn Pages. I'd like to see some changes. But I can open a file, make some changes, save and export to PDF, and close it, faster than just opening the old Windows/Word version. Speed isn't everything but thumb twiddling is tedious.
I am not too sure on the anti-trust thing, buying part of your competitor is exact opposite. Unless Microsoft was playing the "we will create our own competitor angle" then it makes sense. I also do not think MS cared for the Apple user base to beat Netscape , they were already on 90% of computers and making explorer the default on Mac will put them back in the "anti-trust" thing.
I will give you the part where they dropped the lawsuits , I can see they will pay more in court than investing $115M in Apple but I doubt Apple would win that one since I really so no resemblance between Windows 95 and OS 7/8 .
quarter million people rate it 4.7/5 . If you do the calculations thats $20M/year loss to Microsoft. Of course those who chose to rate the app, others might use it without writing a review.
I am one of the people who used Apple apps because it was free but I had to resort to MS Office when:-
1-Had to open a word document for editing in business situation
2-Had to use Excel to do some simple power query for a business "solution"
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I haven't been in VM game for a long time, since I gave up on it on laptops, but how well does it work on a laptop? Ages ago it was like launching a nuke, waiting for a long time to boot the VM OS and it worked in slow-er motion. Unpleasant experience.
Count me as one of the quarter million users that rated Pages at 4.7 stars. The only reasons I have Office on my Mac are:
- Many clients are MS shops and require consultants to use their Microsoft 365 authentication, tools and cloud storage
- Excel — for complex spreadsheets
I gave OnlyOffice and LibreOffice a spin to see if they can replace Excel. Results are shocking. A simple Find&replace messes your formatting, OnlyOffice jitters around, there is no tables option in LibreOffice . Makes me appreciate MS Office and Numbers.
FOSS are really underfunded. I can't see how any one uses this as a replacement. At least the Spreadsheet part of it.
FOSS are really underfunded. I can't see how any one uses this as a replacement. At least the Spreadsheet part of it.
I found tables in LibreOffice. What version are you using? Or are you referring to something else?
That's about it. I use Excel and Numbers and will continue to pay for stuff.
LibreOffice is not underfunded. It was very very well funded for many years. It's just crap and buggy as anything. Also I opened about 20 bugs on bugzilla which are still there after a decade and still a problem. One of them even has 100 or so comments on it from people suffering from the same problems.
I haven't given Apple apps 5 minutes, ever. As I teach, we have a Microsoft account.
24.2.3.2
Thats in the Write app which WORD equivalent. I am talking about Spreadsheets , the EXCEL equivalent. Here is 1 min explaination
Maybe if I was a programer I would understand better, but I never get why FOSS projects are always harder to use and has less polish. I would blame funding but you say LibreOffice is well funded. Sometimes it gets confusing because sometimes 1 guy can develop a better product than a corporate app, like Christian Selig who's Apollo app was a better client than the official Reddit one.
This doesn't apply to all FOSS projects though as Firefox, VLC, Joplin, Bitwarden and some others are on par with the proprietary ones. I hear Blender is even better than the commercial ones.
Fun fact: in my experience macos is the best platform to use office, with windows there is a mess between different office 365 , perpetual, using the same accoutn to login on the system user and the app, windows update keep updating Office and screws up. On Macos you can just use any activator and no more issues, disable automatic update works fine.
They’re harder to use and lack polish because most OSS developers, and I include myself in that, rather like to do new shiny things instead of the bug fixes and tidying that make a product feel complete to the end user. The shiny things are much more fun.
It takes a special kind of person to do that last 20% and there aren’t many of them. But as you say, they do exist.
You can do that on windows too. Most people I know, and that includes corporates, use OHook to activate it and then run a bunch of GPOs in that turn off all the network and cloud stuff.
since they are well funded, I assume they have some people working on the polish/20% part.
well you asked about the ones that use the free apple software over office and I showed you. Remember, Apple suite is only MacOS/iOS , Microsoft office is on all platforms and Windows has 75% market share at least. In addition, how many of those Office users are corporates? which is not something Apple aims for, they are aiming just for the home user.
Also I do not know where you got the 1.5 billion office users, I did a quick look up and its more like 360 million users.
Apparently no because they universally fail to fix all the crippling bugs and quality issues.
#Raiseshand
I use the Apple apps for all my personal stuff and MS Office for work as I am pretty much forced to. I don't hate MS Office but I won't pay for it, especially since they went mostly sub. In the oldern days I had Office 2003 and I bet I could install that today and not miss a beat, my point being they charge for things I don't want or value. The only thing that forced people away from Office 2003 was the lack of security updates. I am looking forward to the day I retire as the day MS is no longer making $$ off me. The Apple Suite does everything I need it to do and more. I could also be talked into the open source suites but never found a reason to try them.
IMHO the vast majority of individuals could easily make due with the Apple Suite but are too lazy to "learn" it so they pay... more power to them but I won't.
My MAC is M1 with 8G RAM / 512G DISK. I think experiences will vary. I've only had it on for a few months and for the most part it runs fine. I also used it 10 plus years ago and found it sluggish. It's a much faster experience today, I'm not sure if it's because of SSD or the M1 processor. I have had a couple of VM session crashes so it's not perfect.
People use them for guaranteed compatibility, it is a cross platform standard. Me, I like Numbers etc. But not cross platform guaranteed. I've been using Numbers for travel planning recently, I export to pdf to send to others.
Its a pointless argument really. People can use what they want, they generally know what the outcome is going to be.
Its a pointless argument really. People can use what they want, they generally know what the outcome is going to be.
I tried LibreOffice a couple of years ago and it made a mess of some of my existing documents.
In the interests of learning and fair play, it is much better now in terms of what the documents look like. But it still has oddities and deficiencies in terms of Table of Contents and export to PDF - both with respect to internal links failing to function.