Using your 360 million number that comes out to .00069 %. Doesn't support your premise.
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Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?
- Thread starter Benz63amg
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Using your 360 million number that comes out to .00069 %. Doesn't support your premise.
I don't blame them though, they are leveraging their monopoly standard document format to make even more money. Its on the people to act otherwise.
I wouldn't advise so unless you are a FOSS warrior. Its usually less features and unintuitive user experience. It can do a lot but hardly can recommend OVER apple suite or MS Office.
Unless you need to do advance stuff, there is nothing really to learn. its almost "it just works" . There is a lot of similarities and any workflow bump you face you can do a quicklook especially with Q&A ai tools (free on perplexity and brave search) . It couldn't be easier.
you seem to imply that I said more people use Apple suite over the paid MS Office. I said people favor free apps over paid apps. Whatever MS Office users base number, its probably the world-wide corporates employees + their governments not the home user.
Pages is a great app and I really like it with the exception of highlighting which is really convoluted. See below and if there is another way to get there besides "Copy Style" and then "Paste Style" let me know. For that one reason alone Word is a better application.
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How about creating a Character Style called, umm, Highlight. With whatever you want for background and text.
And remove by changing to None.
Or use the built-in highlighting:
Thanks for the advice! I guess I was not specific enough and perhaps you can show me what I'm missing? To chose a color is not quite as simple with out building the individual "styles".
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Well, I wouldn't usually want more than one or two highlight styles. So I'd just make one, maybe a couple (say yellow and pink or green) of character styles and that would be that. Can use the same one or two character styles all over the place. Not changing paragraph styles at all.
True that you would have to create those character styles. But once done, you can re-use them. In screenshot I have applied character style Green background to some text in Body and some other text in Header.
Or am I missing what you are trying to do? It is quite possible that I am being obtuse.
I have to agree with @EdwardC on this one. It seems you cant have multiple highlight colors. You can do your method with "styles" but you have to recreate it for each new document and for each style on the page. The other problem I found with this method is that it will change the style of the whole paragraph not just the selected text.
While the Insert -> Highlight method is the answer, you can not have more than 1 highlight color.
This is - for Pages and a + for Word
@EdwardC you can add "copy&paste style" buttons to the top toolbar which makes it easier by right clicking the toolbar and choosing customise
You can apply a Character Style to any selected text - not the whole paragraph.
I have recently been using character styles for specific purposes. I wanted URL formatting in more than one colour. I created four variants - each simply applies a different colour to the text (and background) and added underlining. Then applied these character styles to the actual links. But not any other text in the same paragraphs/cells.
You can see the word "Eltroxin" is in a blue (that colour is supplied by paragraph style) but the link itself gets its colours (text and background) and underlining from its character style - though I chose the same colour for the text.
Of course, I could have let it all default to cyan/blue or whatever. But, after playing around for a while, I ended up with what you can see. And it seems to help associate the title/buttons on the left with the with the URLs on the right. Wodges of cyan can be very off-putting.
Obviously, this is not highlighting. But it seems a reasonable way of getting close.
And agreed about the Insert -> Highlight method being limited.
The cell to the right of dm+d is formatted with DMD paragraph style, and the actual link additionally has character style DMD Link.
More than happy if anyone has suggestions of how better to achieve the effects. I am an old-time Word hand and have switched (mostly) to Pages on my own by the traditional route of diving in and trying to overcome problems as they appear. Not from reading or training of any sort. I could have missed better ways of doing things.
Yes, thanks for the tip but I do have that enabled in my tool bar. I love pages and have been using it as long as it's been around. Was on Claris Works back in the System 7 days as well. Thanks for the info as well as polyphenol for taking time to offer work arounds. This is a great community for things like this.
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I think you are using Styles - not Character Styles!
I selected the three words, then went to Character Styles, and chose Red Bold. You can create new Character Styles (see the + sign on the menu) but for this I just used what appears to be the standard/default Red Bold.
No they're not good, nor the same as Microsoft Office.
Numbers, specifically, is a poor quality spreadsheet app.
And they cannot collaborate cross platform. This is what knocks out Keynote for me, which is otherwise much better fit for purpose than Office.
Personally I prefer the Google suite, which has a number of legs up on collaboration.
You are right 🤦♂️
I didn't realize there is a difference. I do not see why the extra complexity. You can just select the text you want apply whatever "style" you want instead of making it more complex.
isn't google sheets much less capable than excel? after all its a web app.
However, in Word, there is still a distinction!
I can't remember when this setup was introduced. And I haven't been using Word more than very occasionally for a couple of years or more. But there is the possibility of confusion with Word's approach. For example, some attributes of a style do not apply if you use it as a character style but do when used as a paragraph style. Using default styles, apply Intense Quote to a word, and it shows in italic, but does not get lines over and under.
At first glance, it seems odd that if you place your cursor on any of the three "sentences", it shows the style as Intense Quote. Yet the formatting is so very different. First, the first word has Intense Quote applied, second has it applied to the entire paragraph, and the third has it applied to the entire contents of the paragraph but as a character style.
You have to look at the right-hand end of the Current style box to see whether is has an a or a ⁋ at the end. And it is even less clear if you do not display the Styles sidebar.
At least in Pages you can see both the paragraph and the character styles which are applied to the text you are on. At the same time, I know that it is so very easy to ignore the distinction because often Word does what you want.
Pages leaves the distinction visible and, once you know it exists, obvious. Word mostly hides it and, by so doing, can confuse. Also, I cannot see a way of having two (or more) styles for links in Word. It just applies the Hyperlink character style.
Not a clear distinction. The feature set is roughly the same. Any big operation is being performed on server -- the web app is more of a viewer. In some ways Sheets is more capable than Excel -- sheet's query command is really powerful, the ML suggestions are more likely to be useful and sheets has improved sharing capabilities including the ability to share with users who aren't authenticated (helpful for working with clients and friends).
I work in an Office organization whose largest partner is a Google organization. I'm in both suites all day. In general, I prefer the Google suite as it is gets cool new features, such as "Pageless" editing, faster. Excel's desktop app has the lowest latency when working with data but it doesn't integrate collaboration features well at all and the MacOS version of Excel isn't particularly optimized for the hardware, anyway. This means I'm mostly in the Excel web app, and Sheets is categorically better.
We have Office 365 through work, though it is pretty much for Outlook, I rarely touch Word. I don't really have a preference for either suits, though I do think Keynote is vastly superior to Powerpoint. I used to use it a fair bit and found Keynote to be incredibly powerful, especially with the control over transitions, especially a smooth transition that could be stretched out for crazy long times and super smooth. This was more useful when I used to do some backgrounds for our Church Christmas festival that had a full orchestra and I ran the visuals which varied from text, images and video. I could integrate all into Keynote itself which handled things really well.
Hey, I'd use Louts 1-2-3 and Wordperfect if I could - showing how old I am
In a word: familiarity.
I was forced to use Office for 20+ years at work and publishers to which I submitted manuscripts and books all required submissions in Word format. While I did my best to always work on the Mac laptop I brought with me every day to work, I ended up having to write my documents in Word and do my calculations in Excel.
After 20+ years of using Office, it was just easier not to bother to learn Pages and Numbers. Plus, it's still simply more efficient to submit documents in .doc or .docx format on those rare occasions that I need to do so now.
I was forced to use Office for 20+ years at work and publishers to which I submitted manuscripts and books all required submissions in Word format. While I did my best to always work on the Mac laptop I brought with me every day to work, I ended up having to write my documents in Word and do my calculations in Excel.
After 20+ years of using Office, it was just easier not to bother to learn Pages and Numbers. Plus, it's still simply more efficient to submit documents in .doc or .docx format on those rare occasions that I need to do so now.
the excel equivalent is called 'calc spreadsheet' in libreoffice... just how did you not find that?
been using libreoffice for 20 years now, in my book, it's better, cleaner, leaner, faster and more reliable than microsh*t malware, or any other office suite i tried.
especially for very large and complex documents.
Same here. LibreOffice is terrific and rely on it heavily. But no matter what icon set I use, LibreOffice is still ugly as sin.
File compatibility for documents with advanced formatting is still lacking. In those scenarios, I've started using OnlyOffice. I have a Micrsoft365 subscription, but MS Office on Mac OS is a terrible experience for me, so I'm glad to finally be in a position where I don't need MS Office. (OneDrive space included is the primary reason I still have that subscription)
Just downloaded and have been testing OnlyOffice
It appears to be a fantastic MS Office replacement for my usages
That may be my new go to moving forward
I'm really tired of not being able to edit an Excel sheet on my iPad since I don't pay for 365 (and never will)
It appears to be a fantastic MS Office replacement for my usages
That may be my new go to moving forward
I'm really tired of not being able to edit an Excel sheet on my iPad since I don't pay for 365 (and never will)
I found it, my problem is how to create tables with it like Excel Tables. I have found a video to explain how to do it as LibreOffice has a different approach to it.
1) Are the formulas in LibreOffice the same in Excel?
2) Interesting you mention large and complex documents since those documents usually have to do with business and businesses rely on MS Office. I appreciate the free Excel alternative, but usually, for spreadsheets you better stick to excel due to sharing environment with others.