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Microsoft to End Support for Office 2008 for Mac on April 9
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LibreOffice: Free and Open Source. And it can even open Visio graphs and has a database application.
THAT should be anybody's choice instead of pumping even more hard-earned money into the pockets of some corporations.
Here's a novel thought: Let's stop supporting Microsoft!
I stand in solidarity with a couple of fellow posters ... I have no MS software on any machine I own.
I stand in solidarity with a couple of fellow posters ... I have no MS software on any machine I own.
Pages is actually a pretty great document editor. I prefer it to word myself.
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Libre office is annoying as hell to use. It is extremely buggy compared to office and especially to pages. I use pages and google docs.
The new TextEdit is actually a pretty good text editor, better than OpenOffice. I tried OpenOffice, and it's gross
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High five. Once I got used to Pages, I never went back. It could use a couple of things from Word 2004 like more toolbars instead of just an inspector window, but it's not a big deal. $60 for the whole iWork or $20 for Pages plus a little more for the iOS versions with free iCloud syncing forever is a bargain I normally wouldn't expect from Apple.
The Office 365 thing is a total ripoff.
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How about... no? MS does make some good things, namely Age of Empires II HD.
My god, Pages is just terrible. I just use it so I can transfer my word document to the cloud
Really ? As a word processor pages is far more elegant and stable than Microsoft Word is. As a heavy user of MS Word on Windows i have grown to hate the overbloated buggy piece of crap. I'm sure there is code in there hanging around from Word for Windows 1 (which i also used)
It isnt, which is why they are pushing the subscription model over the old buy it and keep it until you have to upgrade model. More revenue and a constant cash flow.
Great for Balmer's pocket book, terrible for most users. Move to OpenOffice, LibreOffice or NeoOffice. They are all free and can handle most Office documents just fine. Outlook is really the only thing that sets Office apart anymore and if your company runs Exhange just use OWA.
Just curious to know, what bugs have you seen? So I can try to reproduce it on my Mac.
Office for mac leaves something to be desired, but honestly I don't find iWork to be much better. I write a lot of papers for school and always do my final edit in word for Windows because it's the easiest to work with. I would have to argue that's true for all the office apps. The only exception I have to this is Keynote, I like using it just because so few people actually do; resulting in a more original-looking presentation because the themes and animations don't look so tired.
Just because you don't know how to use something properly doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Different strokes, different folks ....
I know where I work, we're primarily a Mac OS X environment (with a fair number of Windows PCs in use too), and for us -- the biggest reason to use Office 2011 vs. 2008 has been Outlook on the Mac side.
For better or for worse, we rely heavily on the functionality of Outlook, and though it's possible to use Mac Mail with iCal and Address Book as an alternative, 90% of use who tried it think it stinks.
We're connected to an Exchange server and making a lot of use of calendar scheduling and even shared resources. It's nice having all of that in one application vs. spreading it out all over several different Mac apps.
MS still doesn't really have Outlook 2011 for Mac up to speed in some respects. (Ever try to share a calendar via the Internet so anyone can view it? In Windows Outlook, it's a simple click to upload one to Microsoft Live. No such functionality for the Mac version. Can't view multiple calendars in split windows like the Windows version allows either.) But it's as good as it gets for the OS X user right now.
The rest of the Office suite we could pretty much live without. Keynote is great for presentation graphics and we typically use it instead of PowerPoint, even when a machine has both apps installed. Excel trumps Numbers if you need to do hard-core spreadsheet work -- but we really don't. (In fact, I'd say a lot of companies who do only do because they've misused Excel for so long, making it do things better handled in a dedicated application of some sort. But in the interest of saving money, or just using the tools they had instead of researching other options, they made "mega spreadsheets" packed full of complex formulas or macros.) We do use Word, but again, could go another direction with that if we wanted. It's sort of "insurance" that you can properly open/work with documents emailed in from other people, as much as anything these days.
I know where I work, we're primarily a Mac OS X environment (with a fair number of Windows PCs in use too), and for us -- the biggest reason to use Office 2011 vs. 2008 has been Outlook on the Mac side.
For better or for worse, we rely heavily on the functionality of Outlook, and though it's possible to use Mac Mail with iCal and Address Book as an alternative, 90% of use who tried it think it stinks.
We're connected to an Exchange server and making a lot of use of calendar scheduling and even shared resources. It's nice having all of that in one application vs. spreading it out all over several different Mac apps.
MS still doesn't really have Outlook 2011 for Mac up to speed in some respects. (Ever try to share a calendar via the Internet so anyone can view it? In Windows Outlook, it's a simple click to upload one to Microsoft Live. No such functionality for the Mac version. Can't view multiple calendars in split windows like the Windows version allows either.) But it's as good as it gets for the OS X user right now.
The rest of the Office suite we could pretty much live without. Keynote is great for presentation graphics and we typically use it instead of PowerPoint, even when a machine has both apps installed. Excel trumps Numbers if you need to do hard-core spreadsheet work -- but we really don't. (In fact, I'd say a lot of companies who do only do because they've misused Excel for so long, making it do things better handled in a dedicated application of some sort. But in the interest of saving money, or just using the tools they had instead of researching other options, they made "mega spreadsheets" packed full of complex formulas or macros.) We do use Word, but again, could go another direction with that if we wanted. It's sort of "insurance" that you can properly open/work with documents emailed in from other people, as much as anything these days.
Nice point. I also think that people's priority should be supporting FOSS software, if enough people support it, then there will be no need for expensive software at all.
The more support LibreOffice gets, the better it will become. They are already working very hard to modernise their software. And on the Mac side there is no support at all; from developers, from users.
It's all up to us. And also there is NeoOffice, although the latest version is $10, previous version is always available for free, and the source code itself. It has great Mac integration, that is what LibreOffice lacks at the moment (and will continue to lack, if there will be no volunteer support).
Look, in theory I am all for all these open source software --- who wouldn't want to save money -- but I found they didn't work 100% perfection, and I can't afford to stuff around particularly with business software for work.
I used OpenOffice to open some Excel spreadsheet files, and it was woeful.
With Pages/Word, I did an experiment. I created a document in Pages, opened in Word and edited it, saved, opened in Pages and edited it, saved ... and just kept doing this for several iterations. Eventually, there were formatting problems. It wasn't that I did anything fancy. I just did normal text typing. I can't afford that. I receive and send Word documents to clients for business matters, and cannot afford these formatting errors.
I used OpenOffice to open some Excel spreadsheet files, and it was woeful.
With Pages/Word, I did an experiment. I created a document in Pages, opened in Word and edited it, saved, opened in Pages and edited it, saved ... and just kept doing this for several iterations. Eventually, there were formatting problems. It wasn't that I did anything fancy. I just did normal text typing. I can't afford that. I receive and send Word documents to clients for business matters, and cannot afford these formatting errors.
It's not really about saving money it's about control. You can modify FOSS all you want, no one "owns" the code.
To be honest I don't believe that iWork or Microsoft Office is necessarily better than the other. It all depends on the users context and what they want to do with each Application. I can think of specific examples in different kinds of situations that each Application in each suite would be a better option than the other. I did put together an article that compares the two here, if anyone is interested that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each of the applications.
I can't really understand why a small minority have to be so negative about Microsoft, Microsoft does not have to lose for Apple to be successful.
I can't really understand why a small minority have to be so negative about Microsoft, Microsoft does not have to lose for Apple to be successful.
MS in the past wantonly committed some egregious actions imaginable at a time when the internet was in it's infancy. Some they are still paying for, its not win/lose it's more a vote of conscious.
So did Apple to be honest, it was 90 days from going bust according to Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple. If it was not for Microsoft's $150M lifeline, Apple probably would not be here today.
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That has what to do with MS and their leverage and it abuse of it?
The keynote that announced the investment is where you got your line MS doesn't have to loose for Apple to succeed..
True.
However, isn't this the version that can't even be installed without rosetta?
Most people will have upgraded anyway. It's also 5 years old. A new mac office is due soon.
I agree with some people about liking the simplicity of iWork... and while I work makes page layout and things much easier and more elegant, even when you export to office formats something always breaks.
I had a project for work and I had to use Power Point. Keynote just wouldn't translate but it would have saved me hours of time.
Apple needs to overhaul iWork!!!!!!
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To be fair, I don't think Microsoft did that out of the goodness of their hearts. They obviously saw a return on that investment in the future.
Office and Windows lisences are the only thing making them money now. And they are seeing declines in those numbers every year as mobile devices take hold and reduce reliance on pc's and the OS being less relevant.
Microsoft has more than made that investment back just in Office sales alone. And that money wasn't a, "here's some free cash." They got paid back well more than they paid in.
I'm sure now they may regret that decision because they underestimated the threat Apple would become. Not just Apple, but let's be realistic... if not for Apple, Android likely wouldn't exist as it does either.
We would still end up in at this cross roads in tech, but the map would look different (concerning competitors), and it may have been delayed long enough that MS wouldn't have charged into battle as the under dog and half dead.
Someone will likely cite Xbox as being a profit maker... but when you factor in the losses of the first xbox, and the time it took the 360 to turn a profit, there is that point that they only came to break even. These numbers are never showcased over the lifetime of a product, just by the current year and past few quarters. Now the next gen Xbox will be coming to market, and that will be a loss leader for it's first few years. Long story short, it's becoming a profitable division but it's not bankrolling the company. All that money that's been sunk into it thus far came from Office and Windows. The next xbox will be the one that really shows if MS can fill their treasure vaults in that category.
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While we're talking about abusing positions of leverage, how's that DOJ investigation into the agency model going?
It's going well, hopefully Apple will get a big fine, be forced to give money back to people who bought books and be forced to open it's proprietary format.
How do you think it's going?
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I am using Google Doc most of time. Give it a try, very easy to use, especially if you want to work on things from different locations and computers.
You're fairly delusional if you think most people's interest in open source stem from an ability to tweak the code themselves. It's simply false that most people can modify FOSS "all they want" as only a small minority have the ability to do so, and even in this group most won't have the time or resources.