I'm hoping that Office 14 has more feature parity then office 11. I'd love to see Access be included but I'm not holding out hope. I use Excel for most of my office needs and its pretty close to the windows version.
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Microsoft Office 2015 (2016?)
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I'm hoping that Office 14 has more feature parity then office 11. I'd love to see Access be included but I'm not holding out hope. I use Excel for most of my office needs and its pretty close to the windows version.
The one thing on which we agree.
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As for the relative rates of piracy on the Mac vs. Windows, a simple Google search will give you all of the information that you need. You may also do a Yahoo! search if you prefer.
Piracy rates on Windows PCs are obviously going to be higher because Windows currently owns the majority of the desktop and laptop OS marketshare.
I'm not going to search for something that re-enforces your point. I asked for proof for your statement that the majority of Office users on Windows have in fact pirated their copy. Telling me to do the research for your claim isn't going to convince me.
That is why I gave up on the Mac version of Excel. At first, I thought I needed both Access and Excel, so I installed Office 2013 on a VM. As I started working with larger spreadsheets, OMG
the difference in speed between the Mac version, and the Windoze version (even on a VM) was like night and day.And then, when my needs really grew, I figured out how to do everything I needed in R, and I haven't opened up Office in my VM in about 5 months now. The key feature for me is, that by automating my workflow, I can remove the human error element from my analyses. If you are doing mission critical work, I would like to encourage people to find an alternative to Excel, or any spreadsheet for that matter.
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Office 2011 is a lot less heavy and buggy than Office 2008 though
Somehow, I find that less than reassuring
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See?
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One would think...however, in the case of M$, they seem to be ignoring markets they have a lock on (like (maybe) Mac users of Office, or (definitely) PC Gaming)) and throwing money at untapped markets where they can show "growth" to their investors (such as, the Xbox, which as far as I can tell, has never made a profit in any year, when all the costs are factored in). Just my $0.02
That is why I gave up on the Mac version of Excel. At first, I thought I needed both Access and Excel, so I installed Office 2013 on a VM. As I started working with larger spreadsheets, OMG
And then, when my needs really grew, I figured out how to do everything I needed in R, and I haven't opened up Office in my VM in about 5 months now. The key feature for me is, that by automating my workflow, I can remove the human error element from my analyses. If you are doing mission critical work, I would like to encourage people to find an alternative to Excel, or any spreadsheet for that matter.
Hi, what do you mean you figured out how do everything you need in 'R'? I'm curious what you are using as I would like an alternative to excel for when I'm doing heavy spreadsheet work.
I don't know what this "R" is, but as far as I know there is nothing better than Excel.
Numbers is nice, but it's very simple and cannot be compared. I don't even know there is another spreadsheet available on the Mac..
Numbers is nice, but it's very simple and cannot be compared. I don't even know there is another spreadsheet available on the Mac..
Yes, there is Calc, which is the spreadsheet that comes bundled with LibreOffice and OpenOffice. And there is another spreadsheet software called Tables (http://www.x-tables.eu/more/overview.html) that I am aware of. But, as far as I know, none of them is better than Excel.
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I don't think we will see Access for Mac this time. I guess the Mac Business Unit had plenty of work developing the iPad version of Office, and now Office for Mac doesn't get all the attention it needed. The folks at Microsoft tell that the development for Office for iPad helped the development of Office for Mac by forcing the change of interface and de-carbonizing it. But it probably didn't help in the improvement of features or in the conversion of other Office software for the Mac.
Sorry, I realized after I posted that maybe I should have linked to it...
I was using Excel (and Access) mainly to get my data lined up for statistical analyses in the statistical programming language R and soon realized that R had everything already built in that I needed.
Warning: it is a command line interface, that has a steep learning curve, but holy cow, it is powerful. The documentation is sparse, at times, but if you can tolerate some ambiguity and aren't afraid to try things out then there is plenty of help on the web, like this intro to R for Excel/SPSS users and this place to ask search for answers, and ask a question when you contemplate banging your head against the wall.
You understand that a statistical programing language won't appeal to the majority of people, don't you? We are talking about Office and in this case spreadsheets here, and not programming languages.It's good that you found something that suits your needs better, but most people will go with Excel or Numbers, depending on their needs.
I've had a look at it now and I see what it does. It looks very good, but it's not what I need. I use Excel as a temporary DB during the planning phase of the projects I work on - it allows me to filter and sort so I can get a 'to do' list at the end of it. Excel is about the best tool I can think of at the minute as it's cross-platform (OS X and Windows) so I don't have any problems with the portability of data. I'm sure there are proper DB's that could do a better job, but data portability and time to configure the DB is the issue. I just need Excel to be quicker.
That's probably why I put the "Warning:" bit in my reply. :roll eyes:
I am also relating my experiences, so as usual, YMMV.
However, I think that I come from the same place as a number of people...after x number of years of a virtual monopoly, many people are simply not aware of alternatives. They seem to think that it is a huge leap to move from Excel to Apple's Numbers, or to Open Office or Libre Office, when in fact, there are even more alternatives out there.
If you are using a spreadsheet for a small, personal file, then you are probably fine. If you are using a spreadsheet for anything important, or that uses a lot of calculations...you probably want to get something more bullet proof/less prone to human error. If you are interested, google "why excel sucks".
R is one alternative, but it might not be for you. In my experience, it programs a lot like Logo (without the turtle!) -- you write a command, and it either comes back with the result, or it tells you it didn't work. You string together a bunch of one line commands, and voila , you have a program. Just my $0.02. My background is math and statistics, but I can't program to save my life. But with R, I can get what I need done (and once I write a program, I can do the same thing over and over and over, in milliseconds).
In a way, it is a tribute to Excel that it does so much. Normally, I expect people to use it for numbers & account figures, but M$ has been positioning it more as a lightweight DB recently (as they stop including Access with the lower versions).
That being said, wouldn't you maybe be better off with maybe some project management lightweight app, that had more DB capabilities, including exporting to a .csv or .xlsx file, for convenience?
Maybe you could post a question in the software forum, and find out what other people are using, that would meet your needs? My fear is that Excel on the Mac is always going to be slow, esp. when compared to the Windoze version.
I'm happy with what Excel does, it's just slow at scrolling when you have a large amount of data. That's only thing I want them to change. The openness and lack of structure in Excel is actually a bonus for the way I work.
If *speed* is your main issue, you are the only user of your spread sheet, and you don't have to worry about sharing with others --> get Office 2013 for *Windows* and run it in a VM.
My experience running Excel 2013 in a VM (under Parallels) is that it rocks! It is way faster than Excel for Mac. In fact, before I did that, I ran Excel 2010 for Windows under CrossOver, and that was way faster than Excel for Mac. The only slowdown was having to startup CrossOver or the VM, but once it is up and running, you get Windows-speed Excel, while using your Mac.
That's exactly what I do with Fusion, but I'd rather not have to run a VM for one app. Seems sad that a VM is faster than a native app, it just shows how lazy the developers of Office 2011 have been.
I agree. Plus its the added expense of having to buy a Windows license just to run Excel, or whatever Office for Win program you need.
I am a newcomer to Apple (since June last year). I went the whole hog, Mac Mini, Macbook Air, iphone, ipad.
At work it's a Windows environment. We use Office 2010. And I was using on my laptop and home computer.
Enter Apple. First thing I did was to buy Office 2011. I have to say that I'm disappointed in how it's implemented on the Mac, particularly Outlook.
I was able to sync Outlook 2010 to my Google Calendar which in turn syncs to the iDevices. But Outlook 2011 is basically a stand alone product, so I was forced to look elsehwere. Settled on the Mac version of Thunderbird for emails with the Lightning add-on and Google Calendar sync add-on.
It works but isn't as flashy looking as the Outlook version.
As for Excel, it does a lot of things different to the Win version, and it takes me time to sort out what I'm doing when working at home.
Microsoft Office for Mac is really disappointing. Office for Windows is perhaps the best piece of software in the world. Office for Mac is just heavy and buggy. That is annoying and I hope Microsoft fixes it (at least partially) in the next release (which I hope comes soon).
I don't know if 011 is really disappointing for every use but I do know that I use 013 for everything now. I just hope they port the key apps over as is with an osx skin without leaving out stuff or reducing functionality as they have done in the past to get a so-called 'mac experience.' Anyway bring it out already.
I don't know if 011 is really disappointing for every use but I do know that I use 013 for everything now. I just hope they port the key apps over as is with an osx skin without leaving out stuff or reducing functionality as they have done in the past to get a so-called 'mac experience.' Anyway bring it out already.
That is what I am hoping as well. Fingers crossed.
Here's my two cents for you. Around the late 1970's and early 1980's there was no Windows, there was no Mac OS. There was DOS, and there was ROM and DISK II for Apple. Microsoft was headed by a very savy businessman named Bill Gates, who acquired DOS from it's creator Tim Patterson and sold it to IBM.
However up until recently people didn't rely so heavily on computers to do EVERYTHING. There were typewriters so Word processing programs weren't so necessary.
In the 1980's Bill Gates realized that he could buy other peoples hard work and have them sign away their rights to the software they wrote, and then he would be able to hoard all the future profits. This still continues today.
Microsoft Word was just one of a few word processing programs in the 1980's when MAC OS, and Windows began the long war that goes on today. The reason Microsoft Office is so popular, and has become the industry standard and destroyed its competition is that companies do not want to spend any more money then necessary (even if it means buying crappy mass produced sub standard equipment). Therefore they buy piece of crap PC's that are easy to replace because they don't cost much to begin with.
Now that said nobody wanted to spend the extra money to buy a nicer more reliable computer such as any Apple product. So most corporations stocked their mindless cattle farms (that we call offices today) with these horrible Windows machines. Schools taught the young calves to use them as well, and as these calves grew up into cows and got cubicles of their own, they were at home with the crashbox that runs Windows.
Without knowing how to hope for something better they accepted that Windows was all there was, and "Office" was the only software to write reports on. Soon after all other good word processing programs almost faded into obscurity because nobody really knew about them. Mac users had to use this horrible "Office" program for their Macintosh computers, and suffer with bad tech support and lack of feature, so they could read Word documents from the cattle that owned PC's.
With his plan almost accomplished Overlord Gates laughed maniacally somewhere in one of his many mansions as he had almost achieved a monopoly on Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and e-mail client programs. Fortunately he hasn't quite succeeded in completely making Office the only productive suite for bushiness use.
I personally use Microsoft office only because I have to. I think Office 365 is crap and the fact that you need to purchase a yearly subscription is just disgusting. You should be able to purchase a program and use it for several years as it was, not too long ago.
I wonder how much control we will loose over the years to come, as we go diskless, and rely on teh web to install programs.
However up until recently people didn't rely so heavily on computers to do EVERYTHING. There were typewriters so Word processing programs weren't so necessary.
In the 1980's Bill Gates realized that he could buy other peoples hard work and have them sign away their rights to the software they wrote, and then he would be able to hoard all the future profits. This still continues today.
Microsoft Word was just one of a few word processing programs in the 1980's when MAC OS, and Windows began the long war that goes on today. The reason Microsoft Office is so popular, and has become the industry standard and destroyed its competition is that companies do not want to spend any more money then necessary (even if it means buying crappy mass produced sub standard equipment). Therefore they buy piece of crap PC's that are easy to replace because they don't cost much to begin with.
Now that said nobody wanted to spend the extra money to buy a nicer more reliable computer such as any Apple product. So most corporations stocked their mindless cattle farms (that we call offices today) with these horrible Windows machines. Schools taught the young calves to use them as well, and as these calves grew up into cows and got cubicles of their own, they were at home with the crashbox that runs Windows.
Without knowing how to hope for something better they accepted that Windows was all there was, and "Office" was the only software to write reports on. Soon after all other good word processing programs almost faded into obscurity because nobody really knew about them. Mac users had to use this horrible "Office" program for their Macintosh computers, and suffer with bad tech support and lack of feature, so they could read Word documents from the cattle that owned PC's.
With his plan almost accomplished Overlord Gates laughed maniacally somewhere in one of his many mansions as he had almost achieved a monopoly on Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and e-mail client programs. Fortunately he hasn't quite succeeded in completely making Office the only productive suite for bushiness use.
I personally use Microsoft office only because I have to. I think Office 365 is crap and the fact that you need to purchase a yearly subscription is just disgusting. You should be able to purchase a program and use it for several years as it was, not too long ago.
I wonder how much control we will loose over the years to come, as we go diskless, and rely on teh web to install programs.
Your "two cents" are about 100% too expensive. You leave the impression that Windows and the Mac have contemporary origins. They do not. The Mac was introduced in 1984 based on Apple's Lisa from 1983. Windows as a usable UI was released soon after, but served mainly as a DOS application launcher until Windows 3.0. Windows really did not get going until the release of Windows 95--still the most successful retail version in history.
Windows 95 did not knock-out the Mac. It supplanted MS-DOS and the MS-DOS applications that many businesses relied on. These included such titles as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. They ruled the World when the world ran DOS. However, owing to some critical strategic mistakes of their own and no small measure of illegal monopolistic practices by Microsoft, these and other DOS-dominant titles lost out to Microsoft Office.
With the amount of people still using XP as their main OS today (still the 2nd most popular OS below Windows 7), I'm sceptical of this claim. Do you have any proof that Windows 95 is still the most successful OS for them?