Seeing these posts, I wonder what kind of work MR posters do. I unfortunately produce documents that may be sent to others to edit.
I have to often make presentations on someone else's conference room computer which is not often a Mac.
If you live and work in an insular world where you don't have to interact with other businesses or non-Mac users then maybe these alternatives are possible.
For me, not using Office would be such a pain in the ass that regardless of how poor the software is, I have to use it because it is THE business document format.
This. I am an academic and many of my collaborators use Windows machines. I wouldn't dream of sending them a manuscript written in Pages. I also don't trust Numbers like I do Excel for handling my huge data sheets. Not to mention that most conferences where I present will only accept Powerpoint presentations...
Not sure about newer versions but 2011 for Mac is by far the best office suite I've ever used. Not sure what all the hate for Office is over outside of it being made by Microsoft... who is really no longer the "bad guy" lol.
I find it to be quite useful but if there are too many documents/spreadsheets open and I've been saving for days then the software starts to glitch out. It needs to be quite and reopened to restore stability often.
Therein lies the problem. People buy Office for Mac to gain compatibility with Office for Windows. While MS does whatever it can to keep Office for Mac not-fully-compatible with Office for Windows. It's a silly, annoying little game.
Have you tried to save a Pages document in Word format? Good luck preserving your formatting...
Really looking forward to this! Even though I love Apple software and you can open and edit Office documents directly in iWork these days you just can't beat the compatibility and feature set of Microsoft Office.
Office for Mac feels really outdated, it feels more like the old Office 2003 and its no where close to the more modern approach and feeling of Office 2013 for Windows.
I hope we'll see a more modern UI, or at least make something that fits OS X more not this Office 2003 with grey UI because that makes it feel like OS X nonsense we got today, hopefully we'll see some OneDrive (SkyDrive) integration as that would be awesome for cross-platform workloads as I guess iCloud integration is completely out of the question and the addition of One Note for Macs.
And hopefully they'll actually make Outlook for Mac into something useful, the thing we got today with Office for Mac 2010 is a complete joke that doesn't compare or risible it's Windows counterpart at all, it doesn't even feature Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support which is completely nonsensical if you ask me.
And please drop all the added bloatware and nonsense like Messenger and whatnot that comes with the Office packages for some awkward reason.
Also, I would appreciate uniformity in the retina enabled icons on Office Ribbons. I got to say I'm looking forward to this release but I will not be adopting until they release one or two updates. Also, I'm sure it will take awhile for Endnote to catch up to the new version as well.