Why do some continue using Microsoft Office on Mac?

[maflynn]

I don't mind Word/Excel but OneDrive is just horrible, and that detracts from my overall feelings of Office, then there's the constant updating, and of course telemetry as I already mentioned

 

[weckart]

B.t.w.: did you know that Office was a (freetime) Xerox invention around 1968? MS got it for free (!!!)

Which office? If you mean MS Office, then that was an MS product from the ground up. Microsoft hired Richard Brodie, formerly of Xerox to assist on creating Word. Libre Office started out as a German product Starwriter for DOS, switching to OS/2 before Windows became the primary focus.

There were lots of productivity applications around on various platforms before Microsoft decided it wanted its own and most have vanished. MS Office was not inherited from Xerox as far as I know.

 

[IvyKing]

Libre Office started out as a German product Starwriter for DOS, switching to OS/2 before Windows became the primary focus.

Star Office was also ported to Solaris and Linux about the time Sun bought Stardivision. Sun then spun off OpenOffice, which was forked to Libre Office. The version of Staroffice released about the time of the Sun purchase had an amazing number of import filters. Star/Open/Libre office also had the amusing ability to fixed some mangled MS-Word docs.

One feature of Open/Libre Office that I like is the draw program.

 

[bzgnyc2]

Its time for me to give up on Office, mostly because of how frustrating OneDrive is. I think its functional but annoying on windows but I've had so many headaches on the Mac. Then there's MS desire to report everything do, for their AI, or selling it to the highest bidder.

I just manually downloaded all of my files from OneDrive, copied it to a new drive, and I'm about to delete OneDrive from my Mac, and install Libre Office.

Also give OnlyOffice a chance. Also open source and so far I've found its Word compatibility the best.

One of the curious features of OneDrive/Office which started defaulting to Autosave in the past few years is that every time you open a document, it immediately saves a copy so the version history always reflects the last person to open the file. Then of course just bumping around a document can easily add unintentional changes. At least that's how it worked at the very MS-centric client's configuration. I'm more of a only save if requested, don't make changes unless the user intended to kind of person. Documents aren't preferences files. However, the "app" model seems to have invaded.

 

[it wasnt me]

LibreOffice can read and save in almost every file format.

Badly though.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

One thing LibreOffice can do well that MS Office can't is work with multi-file documents. And putting your multi-file Word document on OneDrive is a guaranteed way to kill it.
LibreOffice is so confident about their multi-file document system that all their documentation is created that way. You can download the documents as PDF or multi-file from their Documentation site.

Also, you can move your LibreOffice documents from Mac to Windows to Linux, and the formatting doesn't change. Try that with MS Office. The only reason I keep a copy of Windows and MS Office is to save any documents under Office for Windows before I send them off.

 

[SnowCrocodile]

The big problem I have with LibreOffice is that there's no good native app for iPhone / iPad.

Collabora Office is super clunky, laggy, and overall a horrible user experience.

The 3rd party suites either don't support OO format, or are by Chinese or Russian companies.

I have since decided that I will just use Apple office (Numbers, mainly) for personal files.